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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.

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

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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?

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

I host my own mailserver, and to be honest it's pretty painless. Usually I just let it run without giving it any thought. It's on rare occasions that I need to put a bit of work into improving the inbound spam scanning.

Selfhosting does need quite some knowledge of the software stack and several additional protocols to set them up correctly to get your outgoing email delivered. Also, like already mentioned in another comment, you absolutely need an IP address from a non-blacklisted subnet (I think most VPS providers will be okay, residential definitely not).

My software stack: Arch Linux (soon NixOS), Postfix, Dovecot, rspamd, opendkim, opendmarc.

Additional techniques configured: SPF, DKIM, DMARC, DNSSEC.

As you can see it's quite a lot, and I've been doing for more than 20 years now, so my opinion can be a bit skewed. I'd say go for it if selfhosting is a hobby.

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

I have been learning about it, and what really has motivated was seeing my current provider ProtonMail have an anniversary sale, and just having the least affordable pricing just to get a couple features I need. I have never been a fan of cloud storage, I have never needed an online service to handle my calendars or whatever else.

I need to do do this out of principle.

You are right, that is a lot of software in use. However, I have been given a lot of recommendations. I got my own domain name. I am almost ready. I just need to setup a few more things. I am taking a long time to do this, I got distracted with other self-hosted applications, but I do want to try running a mailserver.