Ask HN: What do you use your own email server for? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What do you use your own email server for?

15 points_5kpl10 comments

The answer might be obvious, but I'm curious.

I think hosting your own email server it's perfect for personal communication, but what about work-related messages? What if there is the server goes down? I wouldn't want that to happen if I needed to receive a confirmation email for, let's say, password recovery for a website.

I think in some cases services like Gmail might still be the best option, what do you think?

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I've been running a private email server for nearly a decade. It serves as the primary email for both myself and the guy I was dating at the time.

I use this email for everything, and why wouldn't I? I have a domain with my first and last name, then my email is simply my first name. It's easy to spell out, looks professional, and since it's not one of the five other websites I don't get much spam.

It took me probably a year or so to fully work out the kinks, but I can send and receive email to and from any service with no problem.

Would I recommend running your own email server? No. Absolutely not. But you definitely can.

If you want email attached to your domain, just pay a service. I use Hover for my domain names, and they offer free or reasonably priced email depending on your needs. Running a full in server is too much trouble IMO. Unless you're the kind of nerd who runs two dozen websites from a server in their closet, in which case go for it.

After hosting my own for 20 years or so my experience is:

The flexibility and control is worth it, as others here point out.

The early days (ha) were simple; now you need to learn a few things like SPF and DKIM, but those are pretty simple compared with figuring out why your sound isn’t working on Linux, etc.

Once you set it up it’s practically zero maintenance. Postfix and Dovecot are amazing, bulletproof programs.

I don’t jump through any hoops to get my mail delivered. My attitude is, if you’re not getting my mail, your mail service is broken, and you need to complain to your provider or find a better one.

Since setting up DKIM, etc., I have essentially zero deliverability problems. Maybe that’s partly due to the age of my domains and servers, and lucking in to a good IP. Before that I had occasional problems with hotmail, etc. See previous paragraph.

My self-hosted email is faster, better, and more reliable than the service provided by any of the big players, especially Gmail. I have a Gmail account for last-straw failover (never needed) and some mailing lists. Such a poor quality service.

In 2022 adults still communicate primarily through email. All my business is over email. It’s too important to leave to Google.

At the moment I have several of them that receive email for just about any domain. Their banner says they are a honeypot and to not use them. I absorb thousands of spam emails per day per server. Spammers unfortunately no longer blast emails out as fast as they can or I would be accepting more. To accept more I would need to spin up a few hundred more VM's. I also use those servers as a temporary email address. Not really temporary, I mean they will keep accepting emails for a swath of my domains forever but I can go grep for specific senders to get a link or a code.

To my surprise I can still send emails from those nodes. I was expecting to be blocked but since I deliver all the spam to a flat file in a ram disk they don't seem to get listed anywhere. So I use them at times for automated emails and reminders or for reaching out to known shady companies.

Only sending out password recovery links for some service.

I did all the DKIM crap and gmail says it's good, but it still ends up in spam. But that's good enough for my usage.

> I did all the DKIM crap and gmail says it's good, but it still ends up in spam.

I've convinced myself that google actively works agains smaller email providers, and I'm 100% sure their end-game is to push as many people as possible (either business or private) to gmail (ideally).

Otherwise they'd act different:

- Microsoft offers you a manual way to verify your domain and have it whitelisted, in case your mail gets flagged

- Facebook explicitly says why it's rejecting your mail (a link in the SMTP reply iirc)

Putting something like SpamHero in front of it a) reduces adversarial traffic you need to deal with, and b) provides a portal where users can go to check new and recent messages if your server is temporarily offline for whatever reason.

There are pros and cons. Some self-hosting PROs are that you can add essentially unlimited mailboxes and new domains without paying more in monthly fees. Have a new weekend startup idea? Set up your emails yourself for 0 additional mail hosting $. Another pro: Complete control over everything (which could also be considered a con if you don't want more work). Want to set up a catchall? Want to redirect a single incoming email to multiple recipients? Want to get a copy of all emails sent by one email account for backup? Pretty straightforward. Some CONs are that you will be adding yet another set of admin and monitoring duties, which will be dramatically compounded if you host emails for more than just your own interests (e.g. if you also decide to host email for your friends, family or clients). You'll also need to be pretty fluent in SPF, DKIM and possibly DMARC, although that is something you'd probably need anyway if you are a startup and buying your own domains. You'll also need some security, since mailservers tend to get more brute-force break-in attempts than web servers. At least in my experience. And you'll also need to be on top of blacklist monitoring services and learn how to request blacklist removals. Oh! And you'll need to decide if you want virus checking for suspicious emails and attachments. Oh! And a spam filtering solution! For your specific question, have a backup at all times, even if it's only the barebones mailserver environment itself, so that you can quickly restore to a new box and be back up (although you'll still need to change your DNS settings for all impacted domains and wait for that to propagate) TLDR; If you want complete control and want to pay one price for almost unlimited domains and mailboxes, self-hosting is great, but beware the added workload and headache.

Good summary. From my experience if your server has been around long enough and your IP is dedicated and stable, you can get away with skipping some of that (eg. haven't had to do a blacklist removal request in over a decade).

Another little perk to owning your own server that hasn't yet been mentioned by others is you can dictate policies (eg. mailbox size, accounts allowed to receive commonly-restricted file types, max attachment size, etc).

i jumped the self hosting wagon 2~ years ago. some inputs

1. go with a cheap vps and check the IP blacklisting

https://videos.lukesmith.xyz/w/f9pZjSNLHVZ4FFkdnxNaCU

https://videos.lukesmith.xyz/w/c1d4KKBe8iQ3sqL6W8vYDp

if you get a bad ip, ask your vps provider to get it changed. (and open smtp if not otherwise)

2. you will have problems sending to outlook/gmail for a few weeks. your emails will go directly to spam so you have to call your recipients and have them "mark as not spam". this happens separately with or without attachments so it will take some time...

3. i used mailinabox but there are other alternatives so this can be as easy or as customizable as you want.

4. you will be responsible for managing the domain and keep paying for the VPS (dont do anything stupid on the server because that might end your vps in trouble with the provider)

5. use backups for the server, backblaze b2 works nice and has 10GB free so yeah

6. i have used the server exclusively for work and i have found in my testing, i got emails a tad bit faster than gmail but i cant say with certainty.

about your questions.

1. if your "server" goes down, you can spin one up and "receive" the email in an emergency or you can (if you have backups), restore the same and work away...

you own the server so its not like your account will get deleted or anything. anything@anything.com will always be with you so as long as your third party has banned your domain, you should be able to receive the email.

> I wouldn't want that to happen if I needed to receive a confirmation email for, let's say, password recovery for a website.

this is a valid question. so your email goes down and you have to reset a password, no problem. as i already said, you just restore your backup and you will get the email.

Your emails will just not get into the inboxes of major providers. Will go to their spam folder for who knows how long.

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