Selfhosted
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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I plan to perhaps, just maybe, I am not sure, to try self-hosting an email server. But I'll need a good uptime.
Although I am really scared about security.
I self-host my own email, have done so for years. I've not gotten pwned. Use an SSH key and a firewall, only expose the ports that should be public, have reasonable access controls, etc, just practise general cybersecurity—it applies to servers too.
I know everyone complains about hosting email. But I've not run into major problems. My emails get through spam filters and I have good uptime. It's also a fun learning experience.
I think that you have to do quite a bit more setup on email than most other services. There's SPF and DKIM and DMARC and so on. Plus spam filtering, setting up accounts and authentication, ...
Plus email is arguably more important than anything else, since it's kind of the lowest common denominator of the Internet; your dentist will probably send you an email to remind you of appointments, job offers will arrive via email, password resets arrive via email, and so on.
So it is a bit scary.
Having said that, as long as you're not hosting from a residential IP addresses it is definitely achievable. You can start with one domain and use it for low-value purposes (or for accounts that allow multiple email addresses, like GitHub).
Been running one for many years, mostly issue-free. Had to request whitelists way in the beginning, but things turned out ok.
Check out this super great guide. https://workaround.org/ispmail-trixie
Well, it’s a good learning experience. But….. don’t. Good luck getting around the major email providers’ smart screen shit. It’s probably not gonna happen. I tried a few years ago, and even microslop couldn’t figure out why their shit screen crap wouldn’t allow my emails. It’s not in their best interest to fix it. So they don’t. But it’s worth doing it in the short term to learn how to do it. Teaches you about email, spf, dkim etc. which actually does translate to real world skills. I used what I learnt setting it up in my real life job.
Yeah, email is one of the more annoying things to self host. Google rejects mine because my ISP has all their non static IPs on block lists (even though my IP hasn't changed once since I've been with them it's still not "static", can't change the reverse DNS) and I'm not paying 150% more a month for a business account to get a static IP. I ended up just using a free email relay. Still had to setup SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and all that jazz still.
Yup. It’s so damn annoying hosting email. Do it once to learn, but don’t do it as a permanent solution. It takes so much maintenance to keep it going, if you even do get it working.
What maintenance do you mean? run OS updates and pay the vps bill. that's true for any self hosted application. which specific maintenance are you referring to?
Setting up the newfangled security thing. TLS, DKIM, DMARC, SPF are the big ones over the years. Finding out you've been silently blackisted by a provider and hoping and praying they'll answer your request to unblock. Managing your own spam filter.