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?
Yes, I still run my own email server. It is not for the faint of heart, but once it’s configured and your IP reputation is clean, it’s mostly smooth sailing. I have not had any deliverability problems to date, initial setup/learning period notwithstanding.
If you’re not scared away yet, here are some specific challenges you’ll face:
- SMTP ports are typically blocked by many providers as a spam prevention measure. Hosting on a residential connection is often a complete non-starter and is becoming more difficult on business class connections as well (at least in the US, anyway).
- If you plan to host in a VPS, good luck getting a clean IPv4 address. Most are on one or more public blacklists and likely several company-specific ones (cough Microsoft cough). I spent about 2 weeks getting my new VPS’s IP reputation cleaned up before I migrated from the old VPS.
- Uptime: You need to have a reliable hosting solution with minimal power/server/network downtime.
- Learning Curve: Email is not just one technology; it’s several that work together. So in a very basic email server, you will have Postfix as your MTA, Dovecot as your MDA, some kind of spam detection and filtering (e.g. SpamAssassin), some kind of antivirus to scan messages/attachments (e.g. Clamd), message signing (DKIM), user administration/management, webmail, etc. You’ll need to get all of these configured and operating in harmony.
- Spam prevention standards: You’ll need to know how to work with DNS and create/manage all of the appropriate records on your domain (MX, SPF, DMARC, DKIM records, etc). All of these are pretty much required in 2023 in order for messages from your server to reach your recipient.
- Keeping your IP reputation clean: This is an ongoing challenge if you host for a lot of people. It can only take one or two compromised accounts to send a LOT of spam and land your IP/IP block on a blacklist.
- Keeping up with new standards: When I set my mail server up, DMARC and DKIM weren’t required by most recipient servers. Around 2016, I had to bolt on OpenDKIM to my email stack otherwise my messages ended up in the recipient’s spam folder. -Contingency Plan: One day you may just wake up and decide it’s too much to keep managing your own email server. I’m not there yet, but I’ve already got a plan in place to let a bigger player take over when the time comes.
E-mail was the first “thing” that got me off of Google (to Proton & then currently Tutanota) but is really the last remaining service I not have self hosted.
I have always read about how difficult and time consuimg it was to run your own mail server, but I felt like I needed to experience it myself. So I purchased another domain and followed the instructions on https://mailinabox.email/.
I am using a small VPS on Hetzner and I have to say the experience has been almost flawless so far. I did need to have my new domain taken off the Domain Block List, but Hetzner gave me a clean IP and defaults to blocking port 25 outbound to prevent spam (simple ticket to open, once account is 30 days old and paid).
I know I’m still early into this journey so far, but it has been really simple and I plan to test this secondary domain for a few months before moving onto it full time.
As an avid self hosted of literally everything else, I can say it has been a lot of fun learning so far!
Hell yes, I love the enthusiasm! I just got a domain, which is giving me 3 months of email, so that is great. I feel like Tutanota is the most honest email service when it comes to advertising privacy, and they do some stuff that Proton definitely does not, like make recovery impossible without a key, and use no other method.
My next step is to get a VPS, and Hetzner is the name I have seen pop up the most. I will use that.
Thank you!
Yes I haven’t had any real issues with Tutanota, but it seems like the common trend is that they, and everyone else, is raising prices for things I dont really need. But at the same time, the things I do need, I.e. accounts with enough storage for my family, will start costing more than the price of renting a VPS alone. So for me, its partially privacy, but also ownership of my data and cost benefit analysis where I am now trying to make CERTAIN that my self hosted email is worth the cost savings.
Also to add on, I didn’t like that tutanota requires their app.
That is the thing, I am willing to pay for email, because then the incentives are real to the provider to follow best practices for privacy and quality of life, but the pricing blows up too quickly due to to features I will never use. I need something more granular.
I am also looking at Disroot and Posteo, which I like because the have hardened ethical principles driving their services, and that is worth supporting.
Also to add on, I didn’t like that tutanota requires their app and that was another reason I wanted to switch. Their app is also really slow for me, where I know I received emails but they take way too long to “load” and “appear” once I open the app.
I do. Run about a half dozen email servers for various organizations. Been doing it for almost a decade for some. Other than initial setup pain, I’ve had zero problems others describe. I have used (and still run) docker-mailserver, mailcow, mail-in-a-box and mailu. All are lovely in their own way and fit various use cases better than others.
This is so encouraging! For sure it takes a level of technical proficiency and experience, but any technology that has been around for decades has been simplified and automated in one way or another. In retrospect, it is ridiculous to think that all these email providers could exist if they could not overcome the stranglehold of Google and Microsoft, so it must be possible for individuals to do it too,
Not worth the hassle - best compromise is to get your own domain but use a provider like fastmail to host it.
If they turn sour you can move your domain to another mail host.
I think this is the solution I was thinking about in the first place. I was just musing about it being part of a home lab. I have to consider whether this solution is is better than just paying for secure email.
There are advantages to having your own domain - you can use something like vendor8832@yourdomain.com so each site you sign up to gets their own unique “to” address, that way you can easily send their mail to trash when you dont’ need to deal with them anymore, and will also let you know what company had a data breach if that unique email address starts to get spam.
This is what I want! I want that granular control of having an email address compartmentalized for specific kinds of communication. I mean, I know it is something provided by basically all email providers, but I don’t know, for sure there are limitations. A unique address for each website seems like such a smart thing to do, on top of being stingy with giving out my email address.
Protonmail at certain levels gives you simple login with unlimited aliases. Something to look into. I love it and have been with them for years.
Yes, and I love it.
I use mailjet as a proxy on outgoing emails so that I get fewer of my sent messages rejected, which works.
It was a pain to setup but it’s treating me very well.
Neato! I was so concerned about the logistics of sending and receiving emails, it never occurred to me that I could get fancy and make nice looking emails. All I use is text, yet I can do so much better.
No, I only write plain text emails, mailjet only has ip addresses that are generally not blocked by the big providers and they do all the DCIM stuff.
I get that, I will definitely need to choose a service that helps to not get sending blocked. Still, I was amused that templates were such a big selling point.
Obligatory PSA: ProtonMail isn’t any more secure than Gmail and is likely a honeypot scheme crafted by government agencies: https://encryp.ch/blog/disturbing-facts-about-protonmail/
I know the title of that sounds clickbaity, but they cite their sources. It’s worth the read for those curious about ProtonMail’s history and their CEOs.
Tbh, that document reads like a discovery channel 2am aliens documentary, but it’s not completely without merit.
There are a couple line items about software services they’re using that are shitty that sound pretty legit. The fact that they’re operating in locations where they might have to hand over data sounds pretty legit. Their warrant compliance and logging/handing over a person’s IP address is legit.
The CIA honeypot stuff is all really circumstantial. If the CIA was in as deep as is claimed, a lot of the real evidence people are turning up that they’re not a secure as they could be would be unnecessary.
My best guess is they decided to make an email company based in Switzerland with the schtick that they’re secure (banks amirite?) They’re doing what they can to appear secure without spending too much money. They’re not going to have legal battles to keep your data private, and they are going to comply with agencies request for data. Even if they support end-to-end encryption if they are required by an agency to turn that encryption off for you, they’re going to do it.
They’re probably less likely than Google or Microsoft to sell all of your data to the highest bidder, but realistically there’s no such thing as secure email.
I’ve been self-hosting e-mail for over 15 years and hope to continue doing so. Although it’s being made increasingly difficult by big tech players. I wrote about it here: https://proycon.anaproy.nl/posts/rant-against-centralising-e-mail/
Aren’t you afraid about some important email getting discarded without you knowing about it? Or about unnoticed downtime which results in missed mails?
When I am sending? Well, once things are set up properly I’m pretty confident that things arrive (though nobody can ever be 100% sure of course). I also tend to mail to the same recipient domains a lot, like for work and hobby projects, so once those are tested you get pretty confident.
Unnoticed downtime is usually quickly noticed, I depend on my server for a lot of things. Senders are often resilient enough to keep things in their queue and try a few times. There’s also a fallback MX registry at my (3rd party) DNS host which will queue stuff in case the primary MX goes down.
Gotta say, I’m really happy to see so many people here actually talking about doing it! Usually I see a lot of fear-mongering about self hosting email. You can do it, though, and I think we should encourage more people to do so! It can be a little tricky to set up at first because there’s a lot of different things you need to configure and make talk to each other — I haven’t used them but there’s things like mail-in-a-box that are supposed to make this easier. But the most important thing is to make sure you set up SPF, DMARC, and DKIM DNS records (and set up DKIM signing for your outgoing messages). I’d recommend setting the ruf and rua tags in the DMARC record so you get mailed reports from other mail servers (can help you debug if your mail is getting rejected). I’d also use these tools:
https://www.mail-tester.com/ https://www.learndmarc.com/
Happy mailing :)
Thank you for the encouragement! I am inching my way towards building a server, and I am thankful for all the tips and suggestions I got.
I am starting to think that if email is the hardest to self-host, then perhaps more people should try it. It is worthy to take regain indepedence and autonomy of technology, even if it seen as a lost cause.
Yeah, I hope to get something running soon, just so I can say I did it.
I wish you luck! Some people claim to have troubles sending emails with Outlook blocking whole IP blocks, but it’s a little unclear how much of a problem this actually is to me… it’s a little hard to know if outlook is actually doing this or if people have misconfigured mail servers… In my experience people complaining about this often have a broken dkim key or something. Maybe it’s worth signing up for https://www.dnswl.org/ too, but I’m not sure how big of a difference it makes.
I will definitely look into those things if I run into troubles!
I used to run my own mail server many, many years ago (early 2000s), but today it’s a lot more difficult. I personally don’t think it’s worth it, but I do have my own domain that I can host anywhere I choose. At the moment, I’m using Fastmail. Lots of nice features, and no complaints.
Yeah, I think getting my own domain is the first step I have never taken. Closest thing to web development I have done is a Neocities I have not messed with since getting an account.
You definitely don’t need to worry about a web site if you want to just use the domain for email.
Feel free to hit me up if you have any questions about it. Some providers make it pretty easy I think to setup and manage all of that together, while others require some manual work on your part.
Thank you for the offer! There seems to be a lot of packages that automate all the hard stuff, so I think the hardest part is actually getting my own domain and paying for a remote server.
Any suggestions on that?
Jep. running a linux mailserver for now 20+ years
its now running postfix :-), in a vm on proxmox…
Proxmox is awesome. Sort of the answer to most of my server wants.
I use Cloudflares email routing.
Point my domains name servers to Cloudflares and enable email routing. I can then create any email address in that domain and have it forward to any of my email addresses. Works great when signing up for accounts. The only thing you can’t do is fire off email FROM said email address
Edit: can to can’t
Not likely worth it. Primary reason is that the large federated email services are skeptical of email from services such as your proposed self hosting solution and may simply not deliver the mail you send. This is to mitigate against spammers setting up bespoke servers.
There are a bunch of other things that could go wrong if you don’t set everything up perfectly, but even if you do, this would be a big problem.
Better off using a custom domain with a big provider. Fewer headaches. I like Fastmail, but many others are great too.
Despite my willingness to self-host almost everything, e-mail remains the last frontier for me. Keeping abreast of standards, keeping up today, avoiding implications in abuse and many, many smaller issues abound … and that’s despite my fixed IP and ISP willing to set up a reverse-DNS for me.
Instead I’ve gone with a paid email provider that I’m REALLY happy with.
I did for a couple years, but moved to mailbox.org a while ago. The effort was much to high to save a few bucks and there is no real upside to it. E-Mail is a troublesome mixture of different protocols from the internet stone age held together by chewing gum (SMTP, POP3, IMAP, DNS, database or file storage, maybe ActiveSync, Web-Mailer, …)
Even when everything is up and running there is always maintenance to keep your SSL certificates up to date, update your incoming spam filter technique, keep other mail providers assured that you are not spamming (DKIM, etc.), keep all the different system services (see above) up to date and interoperable, etc. and every few years when you want to move to a new server, provider or Linux distro you start it all over again.
Damn, it is so bizarre that email of all things would be the least operable by tech savvy individuals. Someone linked an article that explains it, and it truly is depressing. Like, it makes me not want to even have email… which is not really possible if I want to be employed. Eh, it’s not like I DON’T already have free email accounts, I just don’t always like the decision my provider makes.
Well, there are plenty of providers out there there should be one that suits you. Having a domain of your own with DNS access and letting the provider doing the hosting is not (so) hard and gives you the flexibility to switch any time.
That is cool. Everytime I have created a new email account, it has been an island. Never learned to preserve emails… Well, except the one time I use Thunderbird. I should set that up again. Maybe it would solve my issue of multiple accounts??
In any case I like consolidation and I don’t like logging into a website everytime if I can avoid it.
I originally did but the maintenance burden was killing me. Then last year Proton unified their subscription with VPN and Mail (also upgrading my Proton VPN only subscription to Proton plus) and from there I decided to just go all in on Proton mail. I integrated my domain to Proton mail and never looked back.
Same. One day I realized that emails where toi important for beeing host by an amateur me. 😉
