I tried maybe 15 years ago and it went about as well as you’d expect for back then. But I’m starting to get the itch again.
Have any of you tried relatively recently? How impossible is it to get reliable deliverability to gmail and whatnot these days?
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I would recommend something like stalwart, which is just a single binary and works. Gives you a web interface and a zonefile you can just copy paste into your DNS including all correct DMARC DKIM SPF and autodiscovery records.
Setting postfix, dovecot etc. up from scratch can be a bit time consuming and annoying.
Deliverability depends on where it is hosted, many VPC providers IP space is completely blocked in spam filters.
I’ve been self hosting email successfully for 20 years. My goto article for this question:
https://poolp.org/posts/2019-08-30/you-should-not-run-your-mail-server-because-mail-is-hard/
TLDR;
- Mail is not hard: people keep repeating that because they read it, not because they tried it
- Big Mailer Corps are quite happy with that myth, it keeps their userbase growing
- Big Mailer Corps control a large percentage of the e-mail address space which is good for none of us
- It’s ok that people have their e-mails hosted at Big Mailer Corps as long as there’s enough people outside too
OK SPAM is not the issue but my mails will not reach my users at Big Mailer Corps
The article’s answer to this one is handwavey “there are rules that spammers can’t meet, but you can do it just fine”. This is not the whole story by far. This is a more comprehensive overview of why it doesn’t work:
On a dynamic IP connection, you can very easily have had the address flagged already. If the one you have now isn’t flagged, the one you get later might be. Debugging intermittent problems is not fun.
They also like it when your domain has shown good behavior already. I can do that because my domain has existed for over 20 years and I’ve hosted email on it in one form or another for that whole time. A person starting out on their own is not going to be able to do that.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that the big providers are the only option. There are smaller providers, like Fastmail.
Lastly, any server config where they claim it’s easy because “the configuration reads almost as plain english” is a big red flag for me. Plain language config or programming does not work as well as anyone thinks.
I have been using my own email for many years (to this day). Everything is working great. The main thing is to have a static IP and be able to specify your domain in the PTR record of the ip address.
In general, you will need: postfix (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Postfix) OpenDMARC (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/OpenDMARC) OpenDKIM (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/OpenDKIM) Dovecot (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dovecot) Some interface to choose from (soGO, roundcube) Maybe graylists, ClamAV, SpamAssassin, or something else to protect your mailbox from spam and viruses. And if you want filtering functionality, then you also need Sieve.
Where are you hosting your mail?
On my home server. My ISP gives me a static address and makes PTR records for only about $1.5 per month.
How do connect to your mail’s server outside your home network?
Sorry for all the questions, I’m trying to get my DNS working with a vpn and it’s been difficult.
If you want to be able to accept mail, you’ll need to directly expose your mail server on your public IP (router configuration required). You’ll also need to allow your server to egress your WAN as well. That being said - if you really want tighten your security, and don’t care about missing some emails, you could limit your server to seeing only those servers you know you’ll be communicating with, such as work, bank, or GMail servers only.
You can make it so that retrieving your email with your client of choice requires a VPN connection to your home network also.
