Don't host email yourself – your reminder in 2026 | Hacker News Reader

Don't host email yourself – your reminder in 2026

coinerella.com

48 pointswilly__63 comments

I self-hosted for well over 20 years, I did not throw the towel and I do not plan to. Self-hosting is a sign of pride. Neither my government nor my Prime Minister nor even my Ministry of Interior or Foreign Ministry can host their own email.

Last time I checked, only State Security self-hosted.

I was probably lucky, but I rarely had delivery problems. The last one was a couple years ago with Microsoft swallowing my emails and it was due to the combination of a fairly old exim and a TLS certificate verification quirk at *.protection.outlook.com. I found a fix in the form of a configuration option somewhere on SO.

In all fairness, there is very little maintenance involved, and whenever I have to do maintenance work, I take the opportunity to learn something new. Like this year, I decided to finally replace my aging Debian jessie setup by Arch Linux, and I rewrote all cron jobs as systemd timers.

I must admit that when I send a really important email, I check the mail server log if it went off without errors, but this does not bother me as checking logs manually once in a while is a good thing anyway.

Lastly, a piece of advice: treat self-hosting like a hobby and learn to enjoy it.

Oh and the very last thing: the person who designed Exim configuration for Debian deserves a special place in hell for all the hours wasted. If you set up Exim on Debian, just figure out how to use the upstream exim config and adapt it to your needs.

All of the above! The only time I ever have to ssh into my self-hosted E-mail system is when something else upstream fails, like LetsEncrypt failed to renew my certificates, and I have to nudge that thing. Exim itself has been rock solid.

> I must admit that when I send a really important email, I check the mail server log if it went off without errors, but this does not bother me as checking logs manually once in a while is a good thing anyway.

I also self-host my email. It would be very nice if there was some sort of notification system that alerted you if your email got bounced by the receiving server. A notification that fed through into Thunderbird would be marvelous.

Well I don't know if you wrote this in a sarcastic way or not, but when you write a new message in Thunderbird just turn on `Options -> Delivery Status Notification` and your mail server will email you back with a delivery status message (success or failure, although failure can take some days if the receiving server doesn't outright reject your message)

I was not sarcastic. I just tried this by sending from my gmail account to one of my other accounts. Didn't get any email back even though the email was immediately delivered.

ah sorry, I thought you wanted a delivery notification when you are sending an email via your own SMTP server (i.e. when thunderbird is configured to use your own outbound SMTP gateway)

Sounds like most packages in the Debian ecosystem in my experience.

Just do yourself a favor and run Slackware.

This attitude is so self-defeating. If no one hosts their own email anymore, no one will be able to host their own email anymore in the future.

Having said that, I host some of my mail with Hetzner, and even at their scale they sometimes have deliverability issues.

Yes, I do not agree with this kind of advice.

A warning that hosting e-mail yourself can be difficult, is very useful, but the suggestion that you should not do such a thing is not.

I have been hosting my own e-mail since 2004, for more than 2 decades and I do not intend to ever give up on this.

The cost of hosting my e-mail has been absolutely negligible and for most of these 22 years, the time spent managing my (FreeBSD) e-mail server has also been completely negligible (perhaps an hour or two per year, on average).

A good mini-PC, e.g. an ASUS NUC, with a negligible power consumption when it is operated 24/7, is completely sufficient for hosting everything that might be needed for Internet access, e.g. router, firewall, NAT, NTP server, dual DNS servers, DNS proxy and cache, SMTP server, POP3/IMAP server, HTTPS server, Web proxy and cache, DHCP server for the internal network, etc. On a mini-PC that does not come with enough Ethernet ports for your needs it is easy to add many more ports on USB.

It is true that a few years ago I have encountered enough problems with stupid e-mail servers configured to automatically reject as spam anything that does not come from a huge company like Google or Microsoft, but thankfully during the last couple of years such cases have become more rare, not more frequent.

Yes, the world will be a better place with a real email alternative. The current system does not work.

I should be able to refuse emails and not get spammed with life ending phishing and malicious links around every corner.

Email providers shouldn’t be able to whoopsie and delete emails on my behalf, or gatekeep information that’s needed in court.

Self hosting doesn’t fix the core problems with email even if you don’t screw it up, which you will.

"refuse emails" already exists, that's the "hard bounce" thing that the OP is talking about.

Phishing and malicious links exists on every kind of messaging - email, forums, whatsapp, telegram, SMS... you name it, it has spam/phishing. You'd think that at least "real name" or "pay a bit per message" might discourage this, but example of SMS (text) shows otherwise.

With any system the server operator will be able to delete messages, and/or gatekeep information - unless you have some sort of "big brother" setup where every message goes through government-operated monitoring server, and I cannot believe anyone intentionally choosing such a system.

I can refuse a very specific email configuration, but there are so many simple variations, it isn't all that effective. Tons of cold email providers have you first buy 100 domain names, warm up the IP's with bots, and then send the same emails from a variety of email addresses/domains/servers. I think the question is does this low barrier to entry really outweigh the added challenge of allowing low volume actors host their own systems?

(steps on soapbox) And as long as we are talking about SPAM, why in God's name if I block a text message and then the phone number from ringing is there an additional block required to prevent voicemail? Oh, I see, it is so Verizon and others can charge me to block voicemails. Even on Google FI, if I block a number on Messages it doesn't carry over to calls which doesn't carry over to voicemail. Enshitification. (steps down)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30810747 was a proposed solution but it didn't catch on

Basically you had to play a (very small) amount to charity to cold-email someone (and with an escape hatch if you state you know the person)

That system would basically gate all spam without changing much

That depends on what your goal is. If it's to change the world, it's self-defeating. If it's to build a product, it's common sense.

You hit the nail on the head.

Yes and no. Email was designed before the internet had a constant background radiation of SPAM and bullshit, and the network has evolved accordingly.

If you want to deal with the background radiation firsthand that's your prerogative, but it's like growing your own food. Unless you're committed, there's no reason to not just use the grocery store.

Email itself cannot be regarded as a reliable delivery method. That said, I host my own email service, have for decades, and often have problems sending to people. I am not running a product on it, and so my recipients usually will check in spam since they want my email. My family knows to txt if there is an email I need to read (that isn’t a mail hosting problem but I don’t really read email consistently). I also have a small web site where I can put family recipes and my resume and the odd file that is too large for email. And a mastodon instance, sync thing, dns, and an old fingerd I wrote in Lisp in 2008 when I was done being a stay at home dad and needed an industry job.

It is a great hobby, and a good way to keep aware of current trends in internet infrastructure. And, like riding a bicycle to commute, maximally free of red tape or external regulation.

Not when the attitude comes from being defeated by reality. Email is a terrible protocol for highly important communication between 2 consenting parties. Might as well talk over walkie-talkies shared with the entire world, including everyone in the insane asylums.

Hosting email yourself is fine. Once you figure out the right incantations and order of animal sacrifice, it will stay fine.

Mine has been online for 15 years, and I have no issues. I don't even get much spam because it's a weird domain. No routing issues to anyone. It's been my one and only email service for many years.

However, I must strongly caution everyone: do NOT give an account to someone you aren't already married to. I've been administering my ex's email for ten years, and I expect I'll be maintaining their account until one of us dies. I could kick them out, but we all know how catastrophic it would be to lose your primary email, even if you were given years of time to migrate.

So I'll just grumble about it until I die.

Run your own email server. It's fun-ish. Just don't give your partner an account unless you're also giving them a ring.

>unless you're also giving them a ring

I'm sorry you're under the impression that a ring means anything except you saying "I bet you half my stuff we stay together". You are under no legal or moral obligation to continue to labor on your ex's behalf for the rest of your life. The fallout from a breakup is each individual's responsibility.

Yeah that's an interesting juxtaposition.

Why can't you tell her to just use Gmail and autoforward the email you manage to that account?

I'm sorry you're under the impression that you can tell what stuff means to other people

You can deprecate their email address. Ask them to use a new email address with the proviso that you will forward all email from the existing address to the new one.

Than after having not received an email after some period (a year or two) you can disable it. Worse case you can turn it back on temporarily for some critical issue.

- Don't host email yourself

- Don't host your website yourself

- Don't operate your servers yourself

- Don't even own a website yourself

- Don't allow robots onto your site

- Don't allow cookies by default

- Don't do this and that and you'll disappear from "the internet" (google, now llms)

- Don't..

How about we bring internet back to its roots? Let's keep own directory of websites like in ye good old times and be done with it. Internet became a garden of few big companies. 1995-2005 RIP

I’ve self hosted a server for various things going back to somewhere around 2006/7? Whenever I finally had access to a non dial up connection.

I’ve not always used it for anything amazing, over the years it’s been just an ftp server, just http, just a Remote Desktop, a Minecraft server, email server, etc etc. (obviously sometimes combinations, and the hardware has changed from the original - the original being a motherboard without an enclosure I would start by shorting the pins with a butter knife ….)

Wrong! DO host email yourself. You can email all of the other people who have self-hosted email.

can only agree, i switched to mailcow ~1 year ago and it now is so much easier to maintain and onboard friends & family.

I’ve been self-hosting my personal email for over 20 years, but I would never use it to send transactional mail. That belongs on a different domain using an ESP that has the reputation for it (I prefer Postmark).

exactly, this is a stupid and misleading title. self hosting your email is perfectly fine.

The solution to "my transactional email service does not deliver to one ISP" is "use a transactional email service". I have used transactional email services for low volume and highly variable sites and have had very few problems, none of them general blocks - there were warnings from providers and a single digit number of hard bounces when one site had a vulnerability to registration spam (owner thought the previous developers had a honeypot to stop it, turned out it not so).

Its very weird that low volumes are the problem. I have been self-hosting personal email for myself and a few family members (so very low volume) on an OVH VPS for years. I cannot deliver to Hotmail (MS hosted institutional email works, outlook.com works) but that is the only problem I have encountered myself. The heaviest sender in the family had emails rejected by one business.

hello,

as always: imho (!)

idk:

as a business, if the "main focus" of your business is related to email =?> self-host.

but if this not your core business: why in the world would you even think about self-hosting!?

pay someone "as a service" / for your "peace of mind" and be done with that.

as a private person:

if you are interested in learning a lot about the internet and especially e-mail: do self-host ;)

if not: pay someone a few bucks a month and do stuff that matters to you ;)

just my 0.02€

For a business, another option is to have your own server but pay someone to manage it rather than just entirely outsource it.

yes ... i thought this is included in the expression "as a service" :)

it doesn't matter how you slice & dice it, the "service" is to have someone - be it business or be it a person - who is responsible for running this service ... you get an SLA and according to the conditions you are able to work with the entity which provides the service ...

If the person you pay is an employee you do not get the external guarantee, nor would you if you pay someone to maintain a server that is yours.

The big email providers do not really provide a worthwhile SLA to most customers AFAIK. Do they cover the cost of business interruption if your business is heavily dependent on email, for example?

I've been hosting my own email server since 1999. It started in San Francisco, moved to a colo in socal for awhile and is currently in my cellar here in Zurich on a fixed residential ip.

Thinks have definitely gotten stricter over the years, with things like dkim and a few other acronyms I can't remember. But if you follow the rules and keep your server secure I've never had a problem sending to Google, Microsoft, etc.

I'd rather not host my own mail but I like having it close by where if someone wants to subpoena me they factually have to go through me. Also I have so much historical email (27 years) it is GBs and so costly.

It's true. The megacorporations are actively blocking communication between human persons because it increases their profit and the rules don't apply to them. But this doesn't mean you need to roll over and just take it. The benefits of hosting your own email far outweigh the problems of delivery to some megacorps.

>self-hosting email is an anachronism of a simpler internet. The good old days. They are long over.

This is only true if you are being paid to run a for-profit business or institution. For human people acting in their own interest the fight for free communication is far from over.

happily hosting my own email, only problem has been Microslop hotmail, who use some RBL that run as a racket

https://luc.lino-framework.org/blog/2023/0725.html

(but you can just route these through someone else)

Yep, Hotmail is also my only problem.

I'll be moving soon so my stuff will be offline for like 2+ weeks, I'll look at the problem with hotmail again when I figure out what to do about temporally moving my stuff to a vpc provider.

Back when I was first learning about Tech (early 2000's), I installed a mail server at home and configured it all wrong so I gave up on it. A few days later I noticed that my drive was getting full and didn't know why. This is how I learned about a honeypot, I had left it running, someone had used it for sending spam but since I screwed up the setup all the spam was stuck on my computer with nowhere to route out.

Last time I setup a mail server

Personally I have never had any issues hosting my own email (for myself or for business customers) for the last 25 years.

The only time I've ever come across a big problem with email in general was when one of my customers was using 1and1.com hosted email, who apparently have a bad reputation due to spam, and some providers outright block them... but moving that company to self-hosted email fixed the problem.

Sure, it's a pain in the ass, but why should we scare people away who WANT to self-host?

Pro tip for people with low mail volume or those who can spare a few packets on extra DNS traffic: Validating that a host has a non-provider PTR record which has corresponding A/AAAA/CNAME records resolving back to that same IP address, is enough to filter out a large bulk of spam.

I've started self-hosting email in ~2021. It took about 6 months (of mostly waiting) to clean up reputation of IP I've gotten (was in a few spam lists). After that - it was incredibly easy to maintain. It's literally just running mailcow update every now and then and that's it. So, if you are willing to fight for a bit in that initial stretch - no, it's not hard; yes, you can self-host your email.

I had one email bounced from that specific provider, I don't have a website on my mail domain, but I explained what I used it for and never had any issues. I send like less than 1 email per quarter to them and it kept working after they whitelisted my ip.

So this issue seems very specific to TEM

This article was clearly written by an LLM.

The author has two other submissions, one of which is entitled "Programmatic SEO: Generating 100k+ Pages That Rank".

I'm at the point now where I find it incredibly rude when someone expects me to read LLM output without clearly identifying it as such.

How do you tell? I am genuinely curious. I myself find it incredibly rude that people will accuse you of "slop" the moment you basically write anything.

He doesn't, and yes it's rude and mindless. There is no way to tell in the general case.

Has anyone ever tried to have a SMTP server to receive e-mails and have an integration with third-party services to send e-mails (aws ses, sendgrid, ...) ?

In my experience receiving e-mails is easy, you just need to deal with some spam. But reliable e-mail delivery can be tricky, especially if you don't send a lot of e-mails regularly.

> Now imagine doing this with your own server

I can imagine it would be very similar because in both cases you’ve got your own Dedicated IP, which is only your responsibility in terms of reputation and problem solving.

If you instead used a shared IP service (such as SES shared) then i imagine it would be very different.

The correct title is "Don't host your own transactional business email, use a transactional email provider."

Hosting your own personal mail isn't for everyone but it's not impossible. It is, however, something you'll need to maintain so be ready to pick up a new hobby.

> Professional transactional email services exist because this problem is genuinely hard. [...] They handle the weird edge cases like a major provider deciding your IP went too quiet.

Except the whole point of the article is that they don't handle that. You had to fix it yourself.

Part of the problem is setting up a login system relying on a complicated network of unreliable mail providers (or SMS or any other poison du jour) in the critical path. That's asking for trouble even when everything on your end is done correctly and going smoothly.

Some people say "this is obviously wrong" and other people say "this is too obviously correct to be worth mentioning." That combination can sometimes indicate an interesting point.

That's why I ended up writing the article. I had some comments under my last post in the "worlds collide" category that I personally could not fathom.

You’re referring to dovecot as the MTA in this article.. it’s not.

It's all slop

thank you for the kind words.

I think the big problem is that anyone can email anyone at any time for any reason; and that it's highly abused by people who think what they are doing is fine.

I split the difference, and self host receiving of email but use a host for sending email.

Figure I can always change my sender if I run into issues, but at least I control my inbox.

Don't host TEM email yourself, sure.

I self-host my own personal email service. And it's fine. Painful at times, yes, but serviceable.

Why does every transactional email provider apart from Amazon cost € 70-80 per 100k e-mails?

Some markets just aren't marketing.

- how do companies like mailchimp actually manage this?

- anyone got any ideas? is this their MOAT?

they have entire teams of people dealing with the problems full-time, and long-term relationships with major email providers

And yet email addresses being domain specific also makes it impossible for end users of popular service providers to migrate to another service, unless they are using their own domain name.

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