There’s no shortage of people who will tell you it’s okay to self host email… in fact, you’re probably not hearing all of them, because some will inevitably get routed to spam.

Is the prevailing advice still not to bother with self-hosting email?

From someone who never stopped: YES.

99.95% spam, and no amount of filters and training can do as good a job as Gmail (as much as I hate and would like to get away from Gmail)

I want to turn it off so bad, but fomo, that one email from that one person I knew 25 years ago who only has that email address … fml.

Honestly, if you want it, go for it. It’s a good learning experience!

I’ve been running postfix+dovecot for 10 years now and I’ve had very very few issues, I wouldn’t know it’s not Gmail or some other big provider. Kinda pain to set it up, especially if your provider hands you an IP that’s been used for spam previously, but it’s been smooth sailing since for me. Mails always delivered, DKIM/DMARC and everything.

Here’s a helpful site to test deliverability: https://www.mail-tester.com/

Mine scores 10/10

E: Also, surprisingly zero spam despite my addresses being quite public.

Hi, email self hoster here, though with a unique circumstance. Self hosting email is fine given you know what you’re doing or have a unique circumstance like I do, I run my own ASN (internet thing allowing you to directly connect with other internet networks like your ISPs) and you can obtain your own IP addresses that you control yourself, meaning you lose the issue of ISPs giving you crap IPs, or your hosting provider being blacklisted because of someone else. I never get sent to spam as a result. Self hosting email is a doable thing, you just need more control over whatever IPs you use than most people will have at home

So self hosting yes, but not for the average person with a residential ISP IP address.

I have self-hosted my own emails many times. Up to having three SMTP servers with failsafe option at DNS.

It’s super nice, but I would never self-host SMTP again. It’s a nightmare. I had to email or open a ticket at most ISPs despite my clean IPs. Most ISPs simply blacklist all IPs unless they are major email providers already.

My advice is go for it but let SMTP be handled by who will deal with these frustrations. MXroute is a great choice and it’s cheap.

From a different Lemmy post I wrote a month ago:

I also host my own mail and there’s been little issues.

Microsoft is a pain in the ass if you’re in an IP space they don’t like like DigitalOcean. Which is ironic because they have the worst spam filter by far in the industry.

If you want to get through to everyone you will have to:

• Use a “good” TLD ( not .to, not .xyz, …)
• Don’t use cloud platforms that are regularily used for spam (mostly DigitalOcean)
• Use SPF
• Use DMARC
• Use DKIM
• Use a PTR record
• Don’t make an open relay by accident
• Use proper ports and certificates
• Register an abuse account at the big players (Google, Microsoft, …)
• Don’t use an dynamic IP
• Keep it up to date
• Minimize downtime

I can’t recommend mailcow enough, it makes setting up a mail server a breeze.

https://github.com/mailcow/mailcow-dockerized

Use the MXToolbox to verify your server(s).

https://mxtoolbox.com/diagnostic.aspx

My experience with hosting mail was very good. I host my mail using Mailu, which is just a docker compose file and premade scripts for the usual mail stack software (Postfix, Dovecot, Nginx etc.). I hosy it on my home network using a raspberry pi. I score 9.8 on mail tester and my mail rarely ever lands in spam.

In total I spent maybe 3 hours setting everything up including my domain and 2 hours debugging issues. I honestly recommend self hosting mail.

Self host with mail-in-a-box

https://mailinabox.email/

Is the prevailing advice still not to bother with self-hosting email?

Unfortunately, yes. Here’s a fantastic blog post from someone who gave up on self-hosting last year due to the vast number of problems with self-hosting. The post also does a great job at pointing out why the death of self-hosting email is so bad in general, but still regrettably concludes that it isn’t worth it in any scenario right now.

I’m hosting my own email for several years now with https://docker-mailserver.github.io/docker-mailserver/latest/ which supports all the useful things like SPF, fail2ban, postgrey, sieve, spamassassin. I’m not hosting at home, I rented a server with a hoster which I also use for other services.

It’s pretty unremarkable, mostly it just works. I do have more spam than with gmail because I have to feed all spam to spamassassin myself. I also had one issue with larger attachments where I had to modify the maximum size, but that was also pretty easy using https://docker-mailserver.github.io/docker-mailserver/latest/config/environment/#postfix_message_size_limit

I recently modified my setup to support DMARC and I occassionally check if I can improve something via https://mxtoolbox.com/. But other than that I never had any issues, never looked back.

I’m sure that’s the prevailing advice… I’ve been self-hosting mine for a while now. It’s been lovely. 0 issues outside of some “special” users… Who also are family… So they’re just “special” anyway.

Been very hands off for me. And when shit goes “wrong” (I can think of 2 major incidents in the past couple years?)… I get the opportunity to actually fix it… rather than sitting on my thumbs crying that my emails don’t work.

If you want a reliable provider try Fastmail. Used them for years, very rare outages. I have my local postfix set to relay to them for locally sent mail. Great web UI.

I tried and really had problems with mail servers sending my mails straight to spam even with DKIM, DMARC, etc. I ended up using the free mail service that comes with my domain.

Unless you are committed to it, it isn’t worth it, I personally run my own but I have ran it for awhile and my IP seems to have good reputation but it is fairly difficult to get delivery to all major providers on a lot of IP addresses.

You’re probably better off using email hosting unless you are committed to deal with the headache.

https://mailinabox.email