Comment on How do you monitor your servers?
communism@lemmy.ml 7 hours ago I self-host my own email, have done so for years. I’ve not gotten pwned. Use an SSH key and a firewall, only expose the ports that should be public, have reasonable access controls, etc, just practise general cybersecurity—it applies to servers too.
I know everyone complains about hosting email. But I’ve not run into major problems. My emails get through spam filters and I have good uptime. It’s also a fun learning experience.
NotEasyBeingGreen@slrpnk.net 6 hours ago
I think that you have to do quite a bit more setup on email than most other services. There’s SPF and DKIM and DMARC and so on. Plus spam filtering, setting up accounts and authentication, …
Plus email is arguably more important than anything else, since it’s kind of the lowest common denominator of the Internet; your dentist will probably send you an email to remind you of appointments, job offers will arrive via email, password resets arrive via email, and so on.
So it is a bit scary.
Having said that, as long as you’re not hosting from a residential IP addresses it is definitely achievable. You can start with one domain and use it for low-value purposes (or for accounts that allow multiple email addresses, like GitHub).
Yes, it can be a bit involved. I’d say I can spin up a mail server in 1–2 days though provided the OS is already installed and I have a domain name and port 25 isn’t blocked (that’s the main one that tends to be blocked). It may take longer for people who aren’t familiar with mail servers but it’s not some huge operation.
You can just try spinning up a mail server for fun. If it goes badly then just don’t move over your dentist appointments to it. It’s only critical infra if you use it for critical things, which you probably shouldn’t till it’s stable.