Hacker News Reader

Comment by Sander_Marechal | Hacker News Reader

Why not host your own? It's not that hard. I run my own using exim4 + dovecot. It's pretty easy to set up. Plus, as a bonus I set up mutt on my server as well so when I am somewhere else I can just ssh into my box and read my mail.

View on HN

This is much more of a pain that it seems. To ensure deliverability you need to ensure that you manage SPF/Domainkeys records, that you're not running an open relay, and configure your own spam filtering. It's all quite easy to mess up, so I'd only recommend it if you know what you're doing. Your time is probably worth more than the few currency units/month for someone like fastmail.fm to do it properly.

I used to run a setup like this for a while. Spam filtering is the most annoying part of it, so I soon outsourced that (first to google postini, then to spamhero.com). But then I realized that my e-mail is now flowing through these services anyway, in fact, e-mail is unencrypted and flows through many ISPs which all can read it if they want to be evil -- so I might as well outsource all of it. So I switched e-mail for all my domains to tuffmail.com a few months ago, and am very happy with them so far.

It's not that hard. SPF/Domainkeys records are only needed if you don't run it on a residential ISP account. Use your ISP as a smart relay instead.

I have greylisting and MailScanner to cover spam. filtering. Personally I use spamd on my OpenBSD firewall for greylisting, but have used a Postfix greylisting setup in a corporate environment. MailScanner combines SpamAssassin and Anti-Virus scanning of your mail before delivery. I rarely get spam.

Making sure not to run an open relay isn't all that hard, it's even easier if you use a webmail interface outside your own network.

Learning how to run a small mail server isn't hard. Yes a little up front research is mostly all it takes. My mail server runs mainly hands off. A little up front cost in time saved a recurring monthly cost.

I have, and am well served by, Fastmail's expensive plan: $40 US per year per domain. If you even know what all those terms in the above comment mean that's about half an hour of your time, tops. And it doesn't count the cost of the hosting for your server. And for the secondary server, which receives your mail while the primary is down for maintenance.

There are several[1] guides[2] that demonstrate how to set up a full-featured and secure e-mail system. Personally, I run my own e-mail on Exchange Server 2010--complete with a multi-copy database availability group and multiple front-end servers--but I'm known for overkill.

1 - http://flurdy.com/docs/postfix/index.html

2 - http://www.mail-toaster.org/

Why would you choose to run Exchange?

Because I like it, I'm good at it, and it plays nice with all my devices that support ActiveSync. Cloud providers have added support for ActiveSync, but I'm too much of a control freak to give up my self-hosted setup (both due to perceived privacy problems and spam concerns). At this point my Exchange environment is a collection of virtual machines spread across two physical machines (and two disk sets in one machine), so my hardware cost is minimal.

Fair enough.

My employer uses Exchange (for some reason still running Exchange 2003!!!) and I have always struggled getting mail clients to play properly with exchange. I have finally given up and am running Outlook virtually.

I've been considering this, my main problem is that my cash flow is fairly spotty at times for a dedicated server and I would prefer not to have to worry about the security of my box, uptime and the like.

However if I must, I will.

A guide I mentioned earlier (http://flurdy.com/docs/postfix/index.html) shows how to set this up on Amazon EC2. If you haven't partaken, Amazon is still giving away a free-for-a-year tier of EC2.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com