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Comment by fsiefken | Hacker News Reader

Hi readingnews, I see the benefits of creating your running your own site/blog/bliki/digital-garden on a hosted or even your own server. You can tweak and make it into whatever you want. But what's the joy or reward of running your own mail server? I can imagine the feeling of being independent. But I imagine it also creates a bit of stress in keeping the email server running, spam free and secure?

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> I can imagine the feeling of being independent.

Seriously, this is a total stress reliever. A ton of things are tied to email. What am I paying gmail or fastmail or whom ever? Nothing? Oh, so they can turn it off whenever, or lock me out or whatever, for no reason. Not with my own server.

> But I imagine it also creates a bit of stress in keeping the email server running, spam free and secure?

Again, I used to maintain the gentoo HOWTO on postfix/amavisd-new/spamassassin before the wiki crashed and someone else redid it. I have setup so many corporate wide spam filters... there is no stress in it.

You trade the stress of being locked out by fastmail with the stress of being blacklisted by the mail providers of the people you send mail to, and more importantly the people and governments and banks you receive mail from.

I can’t speak for everyone but I make enough money that messing around with e-mail spam is not worth it, when I’d rather be playing my instruments or whatever.

I do my email through my registrar (gandi) so I don’t have to worry about free email going away, but before that I paid for zoho.

Basically the reason I selfhost is to save time, not to have to muck around. Luckily I knew ansible from work so it wasn’t that much work in the beginning to set that up for my services.

> Seriously, this is a total stress reliever. A ton of things are tied to email. What am I paying gmail or fastmail or whom ever? Nothing? Oh, so they can turn it off whenever, or lock me out or whatever, for no reason. Not with my own server.

Automate occasional backups and use a domain you own outside of that service and they can't lock you out of anything except, potentially, any email you've received since you last took a backup. If Google or Fastmail went up in smoke tomorrow, you'd have all the hassle of... creating an account at one of the 1500 other services and changing your MX records.

You're avoiding an unlikely situation with a low impact and in exchange taking on managing your own mail deliverability where having issues delivering mail is very likely and has the impact of your mail simply not being received with likely no notice of the failure.

I self host pretty much everything. I don't mess with email. I have several times in the past. It's just not worth it to me at all.

> But what's the joy or reward of running your own mail server?

Not having to deal with rate limits or weirdness in regards to delivering mail from software in an automated manner, which would be there with any of the other "big" hosts.

For example, currently i have the following hooked up to a self-hosted e-mail server:

  - Nextcloud/ownCloud
  - Mattermost/Rocket.Chat
  - Drone CI/GitLab
  - OpenProject
  - PeerTube
  - SonarQube
  - Zabbix

Or any number of other pieces of software that could send lots of other e-mails.

If i use my own self-hosted mail server, then there are no odd spam filters or whatever to deal with (unless i introduce my own) - i send as many messages as i need and i receive all of them as well, plus all of the data stays wherever i want it to. This is also relevant for older software that might have problems with the more secure methods of delivering mails.

Oh and there's not a lot to think about, pricing wise, either.

Lastly, running a basic mail server is exceedingly simple with https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver No need to manually configure mail delivery agents or whatever. In my eyes, a mail server with everything it needs should be a single executable/container, with toggleable bits of functionality, rather than some overcomplicated amalgamation of mixed and matched pieces that would need lots of your time to maintain.

No stress and hardly any work once you get the configuration right - which usually comes down to configuring a smart server for outgoing mail, one or more domains for incoming mail and some form of spam filtering - Spamassassin being a good candidate. Make sure your user's passwords are up to snuff and the software is up to date (which can largely be automated) and the total maintenance time is usually quite a bit less than 8 hours per year.

* Exim or Postfix as MTA

* Dovecot as MDA, add managesieve and you'll be able to sort/filter/file mail based on just about any combination of criteria

* Spamassassin to keep out all those offers you can't refuse

* Roundcube or Rainloop for web mail, looking at the same IMAP account as you use on your other devices

I've never had any of my servers 'hacked' in those 26+ years.

One person’s stress is another one’s bliss

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