Hosting a mail server is really easy. Making sure Hotmail, Gmail and others accept your emails is a nightmare.
I don't host my own email, I just delegate my email management to a small provider.
this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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I just decommissioned the mail server I was running, because I didn't have the capacity with the rest of life to keep on top of it. Mailu was my choice of suite, and it was really great once I figured out how to get it behaving nicely behind my reverse proxy. For the most part it was low maintenance, but I would occasionally have issues with cert renewal and subsequently my email clients would stop connecting. I didn't have issues with non-delivery once I set up the various DNS records and did a lot of test emails that I could mark as not junk to various providers. I ended up switching to using icloud+, which includes email with a custom domain. Would I host my own email again? Possibly if I really need more than 6 addresses. But icloud+ costs less per month than the power consumption of the tiny server I was running mailu on over 3 days. Which is... Not insignificant in the current financial climate.
Yeah. I need to stop pretending. I am not that tech savvy, just aware of tech from sites like Lobste.rs and the fediverse of course.
I will say that I initially started hosting mine as a learning exercise, so from that point of view I think it's totally worth trying out, even if you don't keep it long term. :)
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I want to do a setup where i use mailcow at home for receiving emails but Amazon ses SMTP for sending, it's possible? Looks like it is, but i didn't investigate it
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“No. No, man. Hell no. No, i imagine someone would get their ass kicker if they said something like that”
I don't. But I do have my domain and use a hosted solution, so I'm kind of independent and own my data.
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Very interesting. Thanks for the follow up.
there are many replies saying similar things, but don't be discouraged from try it out. i host my own with mailinabox on a vm from a cloud provider. no spam issues. the only wildcard was spending a few months getting my ip address off google's spam filters. it is so worth it, i own my own email/calendar/contacts/notes/todo list/ AND website solution. all with mailinabox. completely disconnected from google etc.
The more I learn about FOSS the more I understand it is just not about using open auditable software, but about having complete ownership of the technology a person uses. I need to learn these things.
Did you ever manage to get off hotmail/outlook spam filters? I ran my own server for years and had no issues with gmail, but was never able to reliably send to hotmail. That was the nail in the coffin in the end as so many businesses I communicate with were on outlook and my mail would always goto spam causing endless issues.
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I used to. I had a docker-mailserver. It was good. But I moved house and changed ISP. I couldn't set up the reverse DNS on my address, and Gmail was blocking me, so I had to switch to a hosted mail server (namecheap private email).
It's a shame, syncing is noticably slower, and I only get one mailbox, but oh well. Just keep on using GPG.
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I'm using openbsd with dovcot, opensmtpd on a pi. I used mailhardener to get it scoring well. I've had no issues with it getting flagged.
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