Unless there's a strong academic reason, it's probably more work than it's worth for the average person. It becomes a vector for attack, and there's external infrastructure that has to be maintained as well (DNS, SPF, DKIM, etc)
this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2023
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It’s an interesting exercise to learn about how everything interacts and works. Beyond that I would absolutely not bother. It’s high effort, it’s shit to maintain and secure. It’s shit to debug when mails don’t arrive.
Worst idea ever. Just pay somebody $10 a month to host your domain and let them suffer lmao
If you want to do it for fun and learning, ok I guess.
But nobody really does it anymore.
For actual mail that I would use, just go with a mainstream provider.
If you want to actually learn real-world skills, get yourself your own 365 tenant with a single license. Well worth the spend (or free if you can get a partner license).
Don’t mean to be dense, but how does one do this? I tried googling this, but kept getting hits on single versus multi-tenant licensing.
Setting it up is easy. Getting the major providers like gmail to not flag your stuff as spam, that’s the real challenge
Use AWS SES.
I set one up for a while and it was a royal PITA! I have since switched to a managed email account using my own domain. So much less trouble. It's just not worth it in my opinion.
I've run my own mail server for over 15 years. If you're going to do it, put it on a VM at a reliable cloud provider, such as AWS. You wouldn't want your email to go down while you're on vacation for a week with no way of fixing it. You need to make sure you use a static IP that you keep forever, because your mail server builds reputation and the IP must not have any reputation of spam that has landed it on block lists.
It's not difficult if you let reuse someone else's hard work to make it secure and keep it updated. This project is fantastic: https://mailinabox.email/
Would I recommend it? It's more rational to bring your own domain to have it hosted by Microsoft or Google, but doing it yourself is more fun and flexible, and possibly cheaper depending on how many users and domains you will be hosting.
How many of you all here, using a hosted solution remembered to setup DKIM on their custom domain? hostname alignment can aid in email deliverability, i believe.
For reference, if you were using office365 you would take the steps outlined here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/security/office-365-security/email-authentication-dkim-configure?view=o365-worldwide
Lastly... if you don't bother, any good reason to skip the domain alignment step?
If you work in IT or similar these concepts may become important, and that makes the effort worth it to me. Otherwise, I agree with the other commenters.
Here's an entertaining lecture that summarizes how terrible modern email is.
Absolutely not. It's notoriously hard.
It’s fun to setup for learning and then to throw away. Don’t do it for day to day use because:
- It’s an absolute PITA to keep healthy, and;
- You gonna get hacked
waste of time IMO. Most messages will not make it through spam filters because of a bunch of reasons. Just writing your friends would be pointless.
I'm using gmail with my own domain and I still get my email filtered out. You would need to warm your IP address for years to not get into spam folders in most places. Not to mention the uptime issue. I would not recommend. You may try fastmail or some similar service instead.
Ask that question about anything, and ask these same questions about the same:
Do you want to learn? Do you have a reason to want to have understanding and control over it? Do you have the time, resources, energy and aptitude?
You've just answered your own question :)
Some people have a deep distain for the idea of self-hosted email, but there's literally no good technical reason you can't do it yourself. I think people react so strongly and insist it shouldn't be self-hosted because they couldn't hack it ;)
(yes, I'm poking them for fun)
Seriously, the only compelling reason they mention isn't compelling: if you're worried about deliverability, pay a reputable service for smarthosting through them. Problem solved, and you still get to 100% control your own filtering, logging, storage and access.
There was an XKCD about this years ago. Basically, the answer was 'no.'
Don't do it, fam.
But if you insist...
lol everything we do on this sub is mostly a waste of time...
Outlook.com gets all the features of 365 for free.
Nah, I can't think of hardly any reasons why I'd want to, so many things to consider. Just not worth my time
Cool to know you can do it, not cool to maintain one all the time.
Even I've moved mail to the cloud these days.
I've hosted my own email for 2 years now. Using proxmox mail gateway on a 5€ hetzner VPS. it relays mail to my mail server which I host at home. I've dealt with my home public IP changing every now and then with 2 simple scripts. SPF, DKIM, DMARC is all set up.
All in all, it's relatively low maintenance. PMG makes a good job filtering all the crap and I have yet to receive and actual spam in my inbox (I only had a couple false positives).
I documented the whole setup, can share if you want.