Selfhosted

50657 readers

356 users here now

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.

Rules:

Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.

Resources:

selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
awesome-selfhosted software
awesome-sysadmin resources
Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

127

[Question] Does anyone run their own email server? (lemmy.one)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

251 comments fedilink hide all child comments

All this new excitement with Lemmy and federation has got me thinking that maybe I should learn to run my own instance. What always comes up though is how email is the orginal federated technology.

I am looking at proxmox and see that is has a built in email server, so now I am wondering if it is time to role my own.

I stopped using gmail a long time ago, and right now I use ProtonMail, but I am super frustrated with the dumb limitation of only having a single account for the app. I get why they do it, and I am willing to pay, but it is pricey and I don't know if that is my best option. I guess it is worth it since ProtonVPN is included. It looks like they are expanding their suite.

Is it worth it? Can I make it secure? Is it stupid to run it off a local computer on my home network?

(page 5) 42 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I ran email server with Mailcow Docker. Easiest way I have found. It is perfect to host your own mailbox but as other have said, the sending from your IP might just get blocked by other big mail servers. Luckily Mailcow allows you to use it as a SMTP relay and you can route outbound mail through the well known SMTP services.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

That is a reasonable solution!

At the moment I am just getting handy with proxmox and learning to set that up. My domain provider comes with 3 months of email, and I hope to be ready by then to port it and keep using it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Jep. running a linux mailserver for now 20+ years

its now running postfix :-), in a vm on proxmox...

load more comments (1 replies)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

“No. No, man. Hell no. No, i imagine someone would get their ass kicker if they said something like that”

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

Your own email server requires near 100% uptime or you risk not receiving critical emails. If a remote email server is trying to contact your email server and it can't it's only going to retry a few times and then give up. Hosting this yourself sounds great until you realize high uptime is not cheap and requires constant attention.

Setting it up securely can be difficult depending on your understanding of server infrastructure as well as protocols like DNS. You need to set up SPF, DKIM, DMARC, etc in order to prevent someone from faking an email from your server.

Of course, federated email does not use SPF/DKIM/DMARC because the whole point is that someone from another server could use your server to send an email (hence the federation). Open email servers were common 20 years ago but very rare today. That makes setup easier, but the main caveat is that most known non-federated email servers will reject email from servers that don't have SPF/DKIM/DMARC because they generally end up being havens for bots and spam since there is no verification or authenticity of the sender.

As someone who self hosts a lot of things, I would never self host my email. If i did I would be paying for two boxes in different parts of the world on different ISPs to provide that uptime. I would definitely set it up securely and not as a federated server otherwise it would be practically unusable for day to day emails.