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Comment by geocrasher | Hacker News Reader

I feel this way every time somebody says this about mail. "Why not just install Postfix on a cheap VPS and run your own mail? It's easy!"

Running a mail server is easy. Running a reliable mail server with good deliverability is not. Not being spammed into the next millennium is hard. Yes, it's possible (I do it on some inexpensive OVH VPSs) but it takes time to come up with a solution that works without being too restrictive. Plus, spam is a moving target.

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I am running Debian stable (exim4, spamd) on my own little hardware as my own email server out of the box for years now, and never had any issues at all besides the initial config. Spam filtering works better than commercial providers like gmx or posteo. I have unattended-upgrades installed and every few years I do a apt-get dist-upgrade. That's it, for years now.

I also use to manage exim4/spamd long ago. Part of the problem I remember is that your email (sent from your server) can be marked as spam on someone else's inbox (e.g. you are blacklisted without knowing it). So while you haven't had issues on your side, it's hard to prove that you didn't have issues outside your box. This was especially common with VPS datacentres, as their IPs routinely showed up on blacklists.

My mini server (own hardware) is on a colocation in a datacenter in the city where I live. I never had any issue with missing emails at the receiver side, nor was my IP in a blacklist.

Its not as hard as everyone makes it out to be. I ran one out of my house for 20 years. The biggest issue I had was webmail providers blacklisting entire IP ranges you were in. Especially hotmail but with a bit of communication you could get around that as well.

This is getting harder than it was even 5 years ago if you don't have decent mail volume

I quit doing it because I have an AWS account for small business side stuff and adding webmail is like 5 bucks a month.

That and there are so many nosey devices on the home LAN these days I had to create 4 subnets with isolation so the nosey IoT crap cant poke around my personal stuff

Why keeping nosey IoT crap in house? You can never isolate it reliably, these things may listen, watch and send data over wireless connection to mothership, just like cell phones. If you don't need that crap, I would dismantle that.

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