Hacker News Reader

Comment by w8vY7ER | Hacker News Reader

In the same boat and now actively considering just self-hosting as these threads will so often advocate for. What a pain.

View on HN

I've heard lots of horror stories about self-hosted mail bouncing as spam. I'd only consider that a last resort, personally.

I have been self-hosting for over 20 years using self-signed certificates, now widely described by current browsers as "unsafe and suspicious." My clients receive my emails without issue, whether they have Microsoft-hosted, Google-hosted, email servers, etc. or their own private self-hosted servers. As do any other service I interact with via email.

Being bounced as spam not an issue for me.

I'm guessing those horror stories are from people who've misconfigured their mailserver. I've been running my own mailserver for over 20 years now, and have never encountered this problem.

Started self-hosting around a year ago. Followed online guides with some tweaks to integrate with my home's Active Directory. Other than that, only had outgoing mail bounce once from mimecast, and after a while they started accepting mail (presumably because of change of my server's ips). Configure rspamd properly and spam isn't an issue.

I run my own mail servers on linode and vultr as long as they have existed. Prior to that I had dedicated servers. For a while, I relayed my forum emails through my mail server and it was very rare to be flagged as spam and I never received a bounce or back-scatter.

YMMV depending on who had your IP address previously. If you get a bad (previously blacklisted) IP, then you can always spin up a new VM.

Some of the really low-end VPS providers are so relaxed they get their AS number blacklisted in uceprotect.

Maintaining your own email infrastructure is a security nightmare on its own right, you are probably better off using Gmail and just GPG encrypting everything unless you really know what you are doing and have a surplus of free time.

We self-host email for some clients. It is not worth the hassle whatsoever and I highly recommend against doing it. Just getting a clean IP can be a nightmare; We switched hosts for this server and we had to go through nearly 20 IPs. Each one we were assigned had a reputation so poor that it wasn't even feasible for us to get it to a respectable level.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com