Ask HN: How sensible is it to host my own email server on Linode or DO? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How sensible is it to host my own email server on Linode or DO?

7 pointsomk9 comments

I wish to host my own email server for me and my family. Looking for an Ad free, privacy friendly and economical setup. $5 instances on these providers are worth it when compared to premium service providers. I also wish to have more control over how my emails are managed and I hope to do this with bash scripts.

A little bit of Googling tells me it should be possible with Postfix and an array of web mail options along with email clients.

How manageable are the following issues on Linode or DO? - Having a well-reputed IP address range such that my outbound emails don't end up in spam - Inbound spam protection - DDoS protection - Overall security considering SMTP and IMAP ports are exposed over the public network

Any other issues I might come across? Any providers that HN has used successfully for their private mail server setup? Feel free to tell me I'm bonkers to do this on an individual level if you have good reasoning.

I did this myself a few years ago and it was a pain. I always felt on edge thinking things like "What if my postfix server isn't working right now for some reason and I'm missing tons of important mail? I guess I need to set up monitoring now?"

IMO, there are email services that cost far less than the time you're going to spend getting it to work. Your home-brewed version isn't going to be as good either.

Email today isn't as open a protocol as it used to be. Get used to Google blacklisting your servers for no reason and having no recourse to fix it, and your mail not getting routing to 90% of people. Make sure you at least follow this [1], if you decide to go down the rabbit hole.

1: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126

I do plan to implement the Google guidelines. If I do succeed I'll try and document this effort. Thank you for your inputs.

FYI, there are some already

https://github.com/mail-in-a-box/mailinabox https://github.com/Mailu/Mailu

Just use a service like fastmail that you can push a custom domain on. The. You can move services in the future.

The charge money, but you get backups, support and documentation. They are also committees in Cyrus and other tools, and participate in internet stands setting. Their servers and hosting setup can survive DDOS attacks that yours can’t. They aren’t going to get grey listed.

If you run your own server there is a lot of over head. Not just disk and service status, but patching, new standards like when DKIM came out.

If you want you can get fastmail to forward all email to your own private SMTP server, so you can practice running email on your own server without being exposed to constant port scanning and other attacks.

How many hours per month are you planning to spend on proactive and reactive maintenance?

How much is an hour of your time worth?

Is there a hosted alternative that ticks all your boxes? If so, how much does it cost?

I've run mail servers for small and medium companies, and for myself. It's been a long time since I've done that, but:

- If you're coming in from zero experience, but with generic sysadmin experience, then you might expect to spend 10-20 hours in month one getting it working how you want, and then 1-3 hours per month

- Having a single MX record isn't a good idea; you should have a second server, or pay a company to provide a 'store and forward' backup SMTP server, and set that as your secondary MX

- It's significantly more tricky to maintain high delivery rates than it was when I last ran my own mail server, so I may be underestimating the effort required

- Don't forget backups. You don't want to lose any/all your mail.

Very valuable inputs. I am looking at AWS SES as a secondary MX record and primary service for outbound email.

I'm fine with the hours as I see this as a valuable experiment.

Backups indeed.

I have done this and it's awful. I don't recommend it because:

A) it's a pain in the butt to setup and manage, and more importantly,

B) Your cloud server will be blacklisted simply for being in the IP range of these cloud hosts.

Go with Linode. I am somewhat shocked that DO, while being great, doesn’t support Yubikeys. Really surprised me and was a dealbreaker.

It's just not worth the effort imho.

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