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Comment by r0b05 | Hacker News Reader

Is it easy and advisable to host your own email server on vps?

My opinion after self-hosting for over a decade is that, yes, it's easy. See my comment further inside the thread for my take on whether or not it's advisable.

I used to self-host email, it was mostly all initial setup and then it just worked for years. Eventually I got a bit wary about the security side of an internet-accessible box and decided to move the whole thing over to AWS SES. Wrote it up here:

https://alexlance.blog/email.html

I am no expert, but from what I've read...

Easy: I don't think so.

Advisable: Hell no.

I believe you have to constantly maintain it, and good luck with deliverability.

Anyone: correct me if I'm wrong.

Not an expert, but I suppose that you can safely receive email using a self-hosted SMTP server. Sending it without being blacklisted / greylisted is trickier. If you don't want to muck with obtaining an IPv4 with a good karma, there are options to send via large providers, such as GMail (IIRC free), or AWS SES, or things like Sendgrid or Brevo. The latter may be effectively free if you send only a handful of emails per day.

I found when I tried out using SES, Sendgrid, Brevo, etc to send emails for my self-hosted exim instance, that my deliverability actually went down compared to sending the mail directly. I believe it was because for the free/low cost tiers they dump you onto IP addresses where they're also playing wack-a-mole with spammers. SMTP2GO was the only one I found that had decent deliverability at a free/low cost for low volumes. Still, I only use it for my personal email. For my business, I host our mail on Fastmail.

> Anyone: correct me if I'm wrong.

OK: it's easy, unless you're the "atechnical" sort.

Is it recommended? I'm torn here, because the big beasts are systematically spam/junk-classifying and even rejecting e-mail sent from independent MXes despite ticking the right checkboxes (FQrDNS, SPF, DKIM, DMARC) and having a clean IP-address in a tidy network.

I’ve been self hosting E-mail (send and receive) with SSL and IMAP, for my family and a few hobby clubs on a $5 Linode VPS for at least a decade, probably more. Very few problems over that time period. Basic exim4/dovecot setup. Occasionally some crappy ISP’s spam filter gets too aggressive but I follow their unblocking procedure and am fine from there. I do keep my old empty gmail account around in case that changes but I don’t use it much.

The fear around self hosting seems overblown. LetsEncrypt falls over more often than my E-mail.

I used to do the same for many years woth dovecot as well. Its not too difficult plus now with the llms it can probably be easier to maintain the configuration fires (I havent tried).

However I did have issues with the VPS provider I was using getting blocked and not just my VPS’ IP but the entire block. So at some point it became tok tedious to have to follow the unblock process.

And so I switched to fastmail and have been using it for over two years. No major complaints.

Would I self-host again? If I have the free time I think its fun and you can learn a lot. However, if you have young kids and are too busy with life I would say go with a provider you trust with your data.

I host a few client marketing & transactional mails.

Mostly sending stuff from marketing automation/newsletter software.

Not an issue. Will be migrating the first few domains of off paid google workspace E-Mail to a self hosted solution. I actually don’t expect too much trouble.

But that’s currently still a hypothesis. I have seen a few people do that successfully. So I know it’s possible. Still. Not having hosted a mail infrastructure in 20 odd years…

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