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Mail self hosting in 2024?
As the title says, what are your opinions on self hosting a mail server nowadays?
Just as a challenge to myself, I tried to set up a mail server in my personal homelab and I successfully made it not being marked as spam or rejected. It's still an early-stage experiment for me, but it has run for the past 6 months without a problem.
I also wrote a blog post, describing how I got there, I'd like you all to take a review and give me some comments or opinions on how to make the content more useful and easy to read (don't be cruel, please, it's my first post!).
Been using Mailcow for some time now - would never go back - smtp2go all outgoing mail
I agree. Mailcow, but in my case, with Amazon SES for outgoing SMTP.
I did it and went back because i sleep in peace that my mail is taken care of. I had no bad experiences with spam or undelivered mails, just a basic layer 8 problem where i hadn’t had monitoring on my system and haven’t received an important mail because of some misconfiguration and a full disk. If you’re willing to really manage your system, go for it. Start with some basic subscriptions or whatever and migrate fully when you’re comfortable.
Mailu in docker is rock solid. I have it from long time now and never had a problem
My opinion is simple: in many cases, email is a critical service that must not fail. The one where I won't be satisfied with 99.9% uptime or success rate. I need more.
Even with a rock-solid setup, I won't be able to achieve the desired level. Internet outages are rare, but they happen. I will need several ISPs at least, or better several nodes at different locations. At this point, I would just prefer that some other company will do it for me.
Don't worry about them. Any legitimate sender will queue and retry for a whole week. The only thing you're missing out on is spam.
Hosting mail is just one of those things I don’t want to deal with. I don’t want to worry if my mails suddenly aren’t being delivered due to IP reputation or some misconfiguration in my end.
I work professionally with email marketing and the amount of opaque mechanisms involved in deliverability, most of which are deliberately neither documented nor discoverable, is just insane. And Microsoft, Google, Apple etc. have zero interest in changing this - their priority is filtering out undesired email for their users, and that is easier when it is as difficult as possible to understand what makes an email deliverable, or filtered.
If my website, OwnCloud, Immich, Plex, database or NVR service is down - it’s obvious and I can fix it. If my mails are being dev-nulled due to some rule or filter I can’t know about, I can’t do anything. And if important mails aren’t being delivered, it can have real consequences that I might only find out when it’s too late.
I love self hosting, but some things are more trouble than they’re worth.
All you need is an smtp relay, and you never have to worry about email deliverability again
Nowadays I'd use Stalwart for selfhosting email.
I explained just recently why I wouldn't use Mailcow or Docker Mailserver for that any more.
I'm self hosting my mail since july last year. On my home server behind CGNAT and with my self hosted SMTP relay on a VPS.