I have been thinking of completely going off Google. I have a Nextcloud server for documents and contacts and calendar. Thinking of moving mail away too. Currently I am conflicted between hosting my own email server. On searching only advice I am getting is not to do it.

How many of the homelabers do host their own email server? What software do you use? Any tips.

  • slaecker
    2•1 year ago

    Yes, self-hosting my email server since 2 years without issues so far. I only send a handful of emails per month but haven’t stumbled into any issues of being blocked by any big provider, even the ones that are known to block small email servers here in Germany. I enjoy the flexibility of as many aliases and distribution groups as I want for the family and being able to configure the anti-spam-component the way it works best for us.

    I run everything on a small VPS at a known provider and checked the IP against block lists. It was indeed listed on one but I never had issues and when checking again a few days ago it wasn’t listed on any list anymore.

    First I tried the available all-in-one solutions but troubleshooting is hard if you don’t know each component.

    So, I followed this guide but moved all components in their own docker containers instead of installing natively to be more failsafe regarding system upgrades:

    https://workaround.org/ispmail-bullseye/

    Everything is running fine and in case of issues I know exactly how each component is set up and can troubleshoot quickly.