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Comment by anthropodie | Hacker News Reader

I mentioned below comment in another thread[0] some time back and I think it's relevant here too

Three months ago I picked up new hobby: Self Hosting. It has been an amazing ride. I learned a lot and I also get peace of mind knowing I am in control of my data. I understand that there is no self-hosted alternative for certain SaaS services but I think that will change as more and more people choose to be in control of their data.

A good place to start [1]

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30021404

[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted

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Self-hosting is great, but self-hosting email is generally nothing but a world of hurt. That's the one thing I would always leave to an established company.

My experience as well. Self host email if you want most of your messages to end up in spam...that's even if your ISP allows a self-hosted email server on their network. Read the fine print first.

But pretty much everything else is super fun to self-host, especially if you get comfortable with docker and reverse proxies like nginx.

Agreed, I self hosted for many years and eventually gave it up. Maintaining high IP trust is tricky.

A fun hack is to run a captcha-free fake forum and allow random bot signups to generate outbound mail volume and trust.

I imagine this could backfire if you get reported as spam by people who's email addresses bots have used.

Been self hosting email since 2000. Very little maintenance. I lower risk by having less than 5 actual accounts, and of course normal anti spam measures.

How many of your outgoing messages actually make it through to the intended recipient?

This. I self-hosted from the mid-90s until giving up in 2017. My outgoing email was increasingly black-holed by major email providers. I eventually accepted that I would either have to give up on email or pay for hosting. At some level this feels like paying protection money, but there are a lot of things about the internet that don't match up very well with 90s idealism.

I haven't had any issues that I've noticed. Sending to gmail for example is issue free. Maybe I am lucky?

Nah, that’s FUD. I had a pretty easy time setting it up myself. You only have to setup SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Which is pretty easy by itself. You even have online services to check that you have set it up everything correctly.

That’s just where you’re getting started. The biggest hurdle is you have no reputation (or worse, you’re on a shared provider giving you negative reputation to start), and you have no good way to build that up as an individual person, and no good way to debug/appeal each case as your emails get rejected as possible spam.

I’m on hetzner. My IP address was in some dnsrbl lists. I appealed and got my ip clean. Now I can send emails to gmail and outlook and they arrive successfully. I don’t see where all this fuss comes. You set up your server according to google and you are good to go. That’s all.

Self hosting is great, but ultimately most people don't necessarily have time to do all that.

Ideally your phones could be the web servers, and a new class of apps could be created that run on your phone, acting as both client and server.

something like yunohost installed on a VPS is probably the best route for anyone with limited time.

https://yunohost.org

Self hosting email should be considered self harm.

Selfhosted is a great community, tons of friendly and helpful people over there.

Is there any way to guarantee your hosting provider does not access your data? That no one can read your storage volumes and a hypervisor can't access instance ram?

I haven't gone that route. Everything is in my home network hosted on couple of Raspberry PIs with HDDs attached. I am going to enable encrypted backups some time in future but I have not decided whether I will choose a cloud provider or choose to do it at my own off-site location.

It is possible to encrypt file system on VPS. Maybe you could look into it if you choose to go with cloud provider option. The main reason I avoid them is because of the uncertainty around pricing.

Short answer: No.

Encrypted volumes need to be unlocked, and that needs a key in RAM somewhere. The hosting provider has full access to RAM if they want to, and can extract the keys.

I’m not sure if people don’t understand this, or don’t care, but the tsunami of people using the Cloud points to it being some mix of both.

It is so much work, I wish someone would just self-host for me and charge me a fee for it.

Heck they could even subsidize my fee by selling me ads... oh, wait a second...

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