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Comment by readingnews | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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> 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.

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.

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