> You run your own email server on your own VPS and your own domain name, serving yourself and maybe a few family members and close friends.
I would not recommend doing this unless you have a really good idea what running a public facing smtpd involves in the year 2021 for full email deliverability to/from all destinations.
Your main problem will be that almost certainly whatever VPS host you're on will have "polluted" IP space from previous customers and neighbouring IPs in the same netblocks. It will be something entirely beyond your control and not likely to ever get fixed.
If you want to self host your own email you need an unimpeachable clean section of IP space, which these days means working with a more traditional ISP that will cost you a lot more for service per month.
Like, not a $5 to $25/mo VPS, but a minimum of $150-200/mo for colocation services or a dedicated server from a hosting company that has an absolute zero tolerance abuse policy. Or if you happen to know somebody at such an ISP and can work out a friendly deal with them, that might be an option, and would involve much less money.
And that's before you get into a proper SPF, DKIM and DMARC setup.
re: what's "wrong" with common open source webmail IMAP clients, neither rainloop or roundcube are terribly offensive or bad. I don't see a need for a new third thing that's apparently not designed for large scale production use (both of the above are used by some large universities and others), catering to a niche market of people who want to just self-host personal email.
> I would not recommend doing this unless you have a really good idea what running a public facing smtpd involves in the year 2021 for full email deliverability to/from all destinations.
It isn't nearly as bad as your post would suggest. There are plenty of reputable service providers, and plenty of software other than sendmail.
> you need an unimpeachable clean section of IP space, which these days means working with a more traditional ISP that will cost you a lot more for service per month
No, it means working with a reputable service provider. I picked up a VPS from RackNerd. The worst I had to do was fill out a Spamhaus form one time. And that's just because Spamhaus is rubbish themselves.
> Like, not a $5 to $25/mo VPS
I pay $23/year.
> And that's before you get into a proper SPF, DKIM and DMARC setup.
These are the least difficult parts of setting up email service. SPF is a simple DNS TXT record; MX Toolbox provides a record generator[0]. DMARC is also a TXT record[1], even simpler than SPF. For DKIM, things like OpenDKIM exist; Digital Ocean describes how to set it up with Postfix[2].
> I don't see a need for a new third thing that's apparently not designed for large scale production use
The internet is for everyone. Not everyone is a university.
1) congratulations, you won the VPS provider lottery for something with clean IP space. you're totally confident it will remain that way? in my experience, hosting services that any random person can buy with $5/mo and a credit card on the internet will inevitably lose its IP space reputation. The margins are too thin in the hosting game for a company to provide personal, human, granular attention to eliminating every spammer.
2) no, openDKIM isn't hard to set up with (for instance, postfix). and neither is properly configured SPF, DMARC, etc. But it's more than 99.9% of email users want to get into. If you're already really confident doing intermediate level linux/bsd sysadmin stuff? sure, knock yourself out, overall it's just another daemon with some text based configuration files, and plenty of good reference material out the on the internet.
If you're determined to do that you're better off with a real IMAP server setup, I recommend dovecot, than whatever this small project is in the linked URL. And then if you want webmail, either rainloop or roundcube. Or just set up a proper IMAP-over-TLS client on all your devices so you don't need webmail.
I use a cheap vps from lowendbox like $20 a year. I used mailinabox and the setup was a few minutes. Been running it successfully for almost a year, except first few months of gmail reputation issue, the experience has been painless. You are simply fearmondering against self hosting email
> 1) congratulations, you won the VPS provider lottery
I'm not the person you are responding to, but honestly it's not that hard. I used to subscribe to a VPS which recycled its IPs formerly used by spammers, but now I use a company which is way more vigilant about blocking spammers. Not all IP ranges are rife with spammers, so all you need to do is run cheap tests with a few VPS companies to find a good solution.
I think DigitalOcean does a pretty good job on managing IP reputation.
When setting up my account with Microsoft's feedback loop, DO was already registered as a steward of my droplet IP. It turns out DO doesn't want to be seen as spam-lenient.
Your post is extremely misleading and full of false information.
I’ve been using a small VPS (sub $10/month) to self host mail for at least 10 years, and I’ve migrated hosts a few times without issue.
I’ve even migrated to a “polluted” IP on a different provider and getting that removed from RBLs took a couple of emails and the entire process honestly took less than a week.
yes, indeed, even if you have perfectly clean IP space and do everything flawlessly, expect months after you put it into production before email to/from anything microsoft hosted starts to work properly.
I had lots of issues with MS, only with recipients in their free services like outlook.com, Hotmail and live. Always soft blocked because they said my mailserver didn't have enough 'reputation'. Opening a ticket got it unblocked but it happened again a few months later. Drove me crazy. Strange enough corporate O365 recipients (my work uses it) worked fine always.
I'm 100% sure no spam was sent by my server as everything was logged.
Clear blog! But I had all that. SPF, DMARC etc. I had perfect scores on all the online checkers and I was not on blocklists.
The problem is MS just ignores all that and built their own system, one that works on reputation. If you don't send a lot of mail you don't build up reputation and they block you. Over and over. Even if you never send any spam.
The big names just don't care about standards and they have the market share to simply ignore them.
I remember I need to file a complaint with Microsoft. You can also register a few outlook.com accounts and manually train the system :)
Seriously, the whole SPAM situation is way overrated. In the name of fighting SPAM, they (the big email providers) blocks us, but they let all the ads in? To add injury on top of insult, they are lenient for paying corp accounts but very strict for "free" personal accounts?
If this does not tell you what "free" big email providers are, nothing will.
I pay $5 per month. It is a uphill battle for the first 1 year then the stigma of the ip wear-off. "Bad" IP block is past thing; all reputable blicklist/whitelist/graylist use individual IPs now. I also have proper SPF, DKIM and DMARC setup, of course.
I made my own web mail because I can and it scratches my itch. Yes, it is not suited for even mid scale deployment, but that's exactly my purpose.
Dunno, I pay Linode $10 a month, haven't had problems. Have a few friends and family that send and receive a fair amount of email.
I've talked to a fair number of other mail server owners, doesn't seem like a big deal. I've definitely had more problems with university mail servers getting blacklisted than my personal mail server.
I have noticed problems that fit well with some mail servers considering the age of your domain name.
Sure SPF, DKIM, DMAC, and friends require some work, but so does mysql (which I use for domain, users, forwarding, and similar tables), postfix, sieve, etc.
Actually your personal email is higher stake than your corp email because you want privacy, security and you are on your own and take full responsibility.
$5/month VPS is fine; mine has uptime > 1 year. Even if you have bad IP that is constantly blocked, you can cheat and use sendgrid to send mails. It is free for 100 mails per day. The most important thing is now you own all your data.
I'm chiming in to say the same thing. I've ran email myself since 2016 and send about 50 emails a day across all accounts. Either we're extremely lucky or it's not as bad as described.
Have been setting up and running smtpd for various ISPs since 1999, thanks.
I have the benefit of having seen how it's done professionally on a large scale, which informs my own choice of architecture for my personal domains and infrastructure.
I would not recommend doing this unless you have a really good idea what running a public facing smtpd involves in the year 2021 for full email deliverability to/from all destinations.
Your main problem will be that almost certainly whatever VPS host you're on will have "polluted" IP space from previous customers and neighbouring IPs in the same netblocks. It will be something entirely beyond your control and not likely to ever get fixed.
If you want to self host your own email you need an unimpeachable clean section of IP space, which these days means working with a more traditional ISP that will cost you a lot more for service per month.
Like, not a $5 to $25/mo VPS, but a minimum of $150-200/mo for colocation services or a dedicated server from a hosting company that has an absolute zero tolerance abuse policy. Or if you happen to know somebody at such an ISP and can work out a friendly deal with them, that might be an option, and would involve much less money.
And that's before you get into a proper SPF, DKIM and DMARC setup.
re: what's "wrong" with common open source webmail IMAP clients, neither rainloop or roundcube are terribly offensive or bad. I don't see a need for a new third thing that's apparently not designed for large scale production use (both of the above are used by some large universities and others), catering to a niche market of people who want to just self-host personal email.