Its very weird that low volumes are the problem. I have been self-hosting personal email for myself and a few family members (so very low volume) on an OVH VPS for years. I cannot deliver to Hotmail (MS hosted institutional email works, outlook.com works) but that is the only problem I have encountered myself. The heaviest sender in the family had emails rejected by one business.
as always: imho (!)
idk:
as a business, if the "main focus" of your business is related to email =?> self-host.
but if this not your core business: why in the world would you even think about self-hosting!?
pay someone "as a service" / for your "peace of mind" and be done with that.
as a private person:
if you are interested in learning a lot about the internet and especially e-mail: do self-host ;)
if not: pay someone a few bucks a month and do stuff that matters to you ;)
just my 0.02€
it doesn't matter how you slice & dice it, the "service" is to have someone - be it business or be it a person - who is responsible for running this service ... you get an SLA and according to the conditions you are able to work with the entity which provides the service ...
>self-hosting email is an anachronism of a simpler internet. The good old days. They are long over.
This is only true if you are being paid to run a for-profit business or institution. For human people acting in their own interest the fight for free communication is far from over.
Having said that, I host some of my mail with Hetzner, and even at their scale they sometimes have deliverability issues.
A warning that hosting e-mail yourself can be difficult, is very useful, but the suggestion that you should not do such a thing is not.
I have been hosting my own e-mail since 2004, for more than 2 decades and I do not intend to ever give up on this.
The cost of hosting my e-mail has been absolutely negligible and for most of these 22 years, the time spent managing my (FreeBSD) e-mail server has also been completely negligible (perhaps an hour or two per year, on average).
A good mini-PC, e.g. an ASUS NUC, with a negligible power consumption when it is operated 24/7, is completely sufficient for hosting everything that might be needed for Internet access, e.g. router, firewall, NAT, NTP server, dual DNS servers, DNS proxy and cache, SMTP server, POP3/IMAP server, HTTPS server, Web proxy and cache, DHCP server for the internal network, etc. On a mini-PC that does not come with enough Ethernet ports for your needs it is easy to add many more ports on USB.
It is true that a few years ago I have encountered enough problems with stupid e-mail servers configured to automatically reject as spam anything that does not come from a huge company like Google or Microsoft, but thankfully during the last couple of years such cases have become more rare, not more frequent.
I should be able to refuse emails and not get spammed with life ending phishing and malicious links around every corner.
Email providers shouldn’t be able to whoopsie and delete emails on my behalf, or gatekeep information that’s needed in court.
Self hosting doesn’t fix the core problems with email even if you don’t screw it up, which you will.
Phishing and malicious links exists on every kind of messaging - email, forums, whatsapp, telegram, SMS... you name it, it has spam/phishing. You'd think that at least "real name" or "pay a bit per message" might discourage this, but example of SMS (text) shows otherwise.
With any system the server operator will be able to delete messages, and/or gatekeep information - unless you have some sort of "big brother" setup where every message goes through government-operated monitoring server, and I cannot believe anyone intentionally choosing such a system.
(steps on soapbox) And as long as we are talking about SPAM, why in God's name if I block a text message and then the phone number from ringing is there an additional block required to prevent voicemail? Oh, I see, it is so Verizon and others can charge me to block voicemails. Even on Google FI, if I block a number on Messages it doesn't carry over to calls which doesn't carry over to voicemail. Enshitification. (steps down)
Basically you had to play a (very small) amount to charity to cold-email someone (and with an escape hatch if you state you know the person)
That system would basically gate all spam without changing much
If you want to deal with the background radiation firsthand that's your prerogative, but it's like growing your own food. Unless you're committed, there's no reason to not just use the grocery store.
It is a great hobby, and a good way to keep aware of current trends in internet infrastructure. And, like riding a bicycle to commute, maximally free of red tape or external regulation.
I self-host my own personal email service. And it's fine. Painful at times, yes, but serviceable.
https://luc.lino-framework.org/blog/2023/0725.html
(but you can just route these through someone else)
I'll be moving soon so my stuff will be offline for like 2+ weeks, I'll look at the problem with hotmail again when I figure out what to do about temporally moving my stuff to a vpc provider.
The only time I've ever come across a big problem with email in general was when one of my customers was using 1and1.com hosted email, who apparently have a bad reputation due to spam, and some providers outright block them... but moving that company to self-hosted email fixed the problem.
- anyone got any ideas? is this their MOAT?
So this issue seems very specific to TEM
Last time I setup a mail server
Mine has been online for 15 years, and I have no issues. I don't even get much spam because it's a weird domain. No routing issues to anyone. It's been my one and only email service for many years.
However, I must strongly caution everyone: do NOT give an account to someone you aren't already married to. I've been administering my ex's email for ten years, and I expect I'll be maintaining their account until one of us dies. I could kick them out, but we all know how catastrophic it would be to lose your primary email, even if you were given years of time to migrate.
So I'll just grumble about it until I die.
Run your own email server. It's fun-ish. Just don't give your partner an account unless you're also giving them a ring.
I'm sorry you're under the impression that a ring means anything except you saying "I bet you half my stuff we stay together". You are under no legal or moral obligation to continue to labor on your ex's behalf for the rest of your life. The fallout from a breakup is each individual's responsibility.
Why can't you tell her to just use Gmail and autoforward the email you manage to that account?
Than after having not received an email after some period (a year or two) you can disable it. Worse case you can turn it back on temporarily for some critical issue.
Last time I checked, only State Security self-hosted.
I was probably lucky, but I rarely had delivery problems. The last one was a couple years ago with Microsoft swallowing my emails and it was due to the combination of a fairly old exim and a TLS certificate verification quirk at *.protection.outlook.com. I found a fix in the form of a configuration option somewhere on SO.
In all fairness, there is very little maintenance involved, and whenever I have to do maintenance work, I take the opportunity to learn something new. Like this year, I decided to finally replace my aging Debian jessie setup by Arch Linux, and I rewrote all cron jobs as systemd timers.
I must admit that when I send a really important email, I check the mail server log if it went off without errors, but this does not bother me as checking logs manually once in a while is a good thing anyway.
Lastly, a piece of advice: treat self-hosting like a hobby and learn to enjoy it.
Oh and the very last thing: the person who designed Exim configuration for Debian deserves a special place in hell for all the hours wasted. If you set up Exim on Debian, just figure out how to use the upstream exim config and adapt it to your needs.
I also self-host my email. It would be very nice if there was some sort of notification system that alerted you if your email got bounced by the receiving server. A notification that fed through into Thunderbird would be marvelous.
Some markets just aren't marketing.
- Don't host your website yourself
- Don't operate your servers yourself
- Don't even own a website yourself
- Don't allow robots onto your site
- Don't allow cookies by default
- Don't do this and that and you'll disappear from "the internet" (google, now llms)
- Don't..
How about we bring internet back to its roots? Let's keep own directory of websites like in ye good old times and be done with it. Internet became a garden of few big companies. 1995-2005 RIP
I’ve not always used it for anything amazing, over the years it’s been just an ftp server, just http, just a Remote Desktop, a Minecraft server, email server, etc etc. (obviously sometimes combinations, and the hardware has changed from the original - the original being a motherboard without an enclosure I would start by shorting the pins with a butter knife ….)
Thinks have definitely gotten stricter over the years, with things like dkim and a few other acronyms I can't remember. But if you follow the rules and keep your server secure I've never had a problem sending to Google, Microsoft, etc.
I'd rather not host my own mail but I like having it close by where if someone wants to subpoena me they factually have to go through me. Also I have so much historical email (27 years) it is GBs and so costly.
The author has two other submissions, one of which is entitled "Programmatic SEO: Generating 100k+ Pages That Rank".
I'm at the point now where I find it incredibly rude when someone expects me to read LLM output without clearly identifying it as such.
Figure I can always change my sender if I run into issues, but at least I control my inbox.
Pro tip for people with low mail volume or those who can spare a few packets on extra DNS traffic: Validating that a host has a non-provider PTR record which has corresponding A/AAAA/CNAME records resolving back to that same IP address, is enough to filter out a large bulk of spam.
In my experience receiving e-mails is easy, you just need to deal with some spam. But reliable e-mail delivery can be tricky, especially if you don't send a lot of e-mails regularly.
itopaloglu83•2h ago