Celebrating 8 years of self-hosting Mail-in-a-Box – nilsnh.no | Hacker News Reader

Celebrating 8 years of self-hosting Mail-in-a-Box – nilsnh.no

nilsnh.no

21 pointsmefengl6 comments

I recently set up email from scratch in a a FreeBSD box running on a free VM from Vultr. The stack is dovecot, Postfix, and a couple of small pieces like the DKIM service. I did add Roundcube too but mostly use native mail clients with IMAP. It can send and receive email with great deliverability on several custom domains. I found it challenging to figure out because I do not speak the language of email but after a while it did all work exactly how I wanted it to.

I tried mail-in-a-box in the past and it was ok but I never trusted it enough to really use it. I do trust my new setup much more. And it really rekindled my love for FreeBSD. The OS is just such a joy to use.

Slightly off topic

Are there any services on the market that allow you to self host email, but have your email forwarded to a reputable service to send / receive on your behalf?

Thats my ideal dream of self hosting email - encrypt and own the hardware, send and receive through a reputable ip to not deal with the politics and oppression of abuse by conglomerates

I use improvmx.com for my microSaaS. With a free account you can forward 6000 mails per month from a *@yourdomain.com to a self-hosted server (or gmail in my case). Paying you can customize the routing and increase the quota.

As to sending through a reputable IP you can - and often must due to port 25 egress being blocked by the IAP - use a smarthost [1]. Outgoing mail traffic is proxied through the smarthost. This smarthost can either be run by your IAP (which turns them into an ISP in a way since they not only provide access but also services) or your can use one of the many commercial offerings. As to proxying incoming SMTP traffic you can setup a backup MX provider which accepts mail for your domain and forwards it to your own server. You can either keep your server online and receive mail in realtime or regularly poll the backup MX server for new messages, the latter used to be quite common in the days of dial-up internet access and can still make sense in case you're on a metered connection (4G/5G etc.) and want to skip the deluge of spam which, even though it get rejected at the gates still adds up to your traffic quota.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_host

mxroute is my favorite.

This is kind of what POP2/POP3 are for. The "post office" holds your mail until you connect to pick it up with the Post Office Protocol, at which point it no deletes its local copy. I think most hosted mail services support POP3? But I think at that point you already have all the disadvantages of non-self-hosted email, plus all the disadvantages of self-hosted email.

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