I’ve been using a shared hosting provider for my email. I’d love to hear how your self host goes. I know there are some loud opinions on the web about how hosting your own email is hard, but also some quieter ones that say it’s working fine for them and isn’t any harder than deploying something like MailInABox.
Comment on Internode and Westnet shutdown: TPG moves customers to iiNet
dgriffith@aussie.zone 9 months agoAlso it looks like they’re nuking their email service if you’re using that
Their mail service has been garbage for 6 months or more now. I have a large IMAP account with them and mail is usually delayed anywhere from one to ten hours. I typically get batch delivery of the previous day’s worth of email around midnight to 2am.
So that’s super fun for all those password reset and account signup emails that expire in 60 minutes…
Finally got fed up with it at the end of November. I built my own mail server with my own domain and for the next few months I’ll be slowly migrating my 20 years of signups using my internode email to my new account.
WaterWaiver@aussie.zone 9 months ago
legios@aussie.zone 9 months ago
I’ve been self-hosting email for 10+years. I can confirm it’s a pain in the arse… Harder from a dynamic IP too (since you basically can’t get any reputation, or you might get an IP that’s banned for ‘x’ reasons)
Postfix + Dovecot here
dgriffith@aussie.zone 9 months ago
I used postfix and dovecot as well.
Basically walked through Linuxbabe’s excellent guide and was done in about 1.5 hours with SPF/DKIM/DMARC.
linuxbabe.com/…/build-email-server-from-scratch-d…
I have my own domain and a static IP with one of Linode’s nanode sizes servers for USD5 a month, works pretty good.
legios@aussie.zone 9 months ago
I use FreeBSD so used the guide here:
Sadly it is a little outdated and 1 step will fail right now until a new package is committed in to the FreeBSD repo (HTMLPurifier) which was removed as it was PHP7 only for a while. But yeah, have SPF, DKIM and DMARC running too. Took a little fiddling since I technically host for 2 domains but trial and error and all good now.
shirro@aussie.zone 9 months ago
IMO the only truly difficult part of self hosting is mail delivery because you end up at the mercy of big stupid companies (eg Microsoft) that don’t give a shit. Even then it is possible and possibly advisable to use a paid service for delivery and let them deal with the bastards.
With a bit of research and a methodical approach I think just about anybody comfortable setting up other linux network services should be fine. I like being in control of my own mail store. I choose to do my own delivery and the only persistently difficult provider is Microsoft’s free email offerings which I care about about as much as they care about running a reliable mail system for their users. They seem to penalize infrequent low volume senders. I have always been signed up to their spam monitoring bullshit and have never had a negative report but they don’t seem to communicate there so you can be blocked and nobody knows how or why. They blocked most of my hosting provider once so I routed my outgoing email with correct dkim, spf etc from a server hosted elsewhere. Easy to do with Postfix.
legios@aussie.zone 9 months ago
Yeah I found both Google and MS will arbitrarily act like dicks. Have it all sorted these days but still keeps me on my toes. Interestingly I can’t email myself from my work email address because the MS mail service they use fails SPF checks…
All fun and games at the end of the day! :)
dgriffith@aussie.zone 9 months ago
As mentioned below, have a look at Linuxbabe’s guide and see what you think. It was basically set up and forget (so far).
The server I get through linode has a relatively small amount of storage. So I repartitioned the available storage of the default install and created a separate ZFS filesystem with compression enabled to hold the mailboxes. It’s running at about 65% of original size and even with 20 years of IMAP mail in there there’s heaps of room left.
And holy shit it is so much faster than Internode’s server. I’ve enabled forwarding on their server so everything gets dumped to my new account, and just opening and browsing the folders/mail is so much faster now, both on my phone with the Gmail app and using thunderbird on the desktop.
Taleya@aussie.zone 9 months ago
Yeah i’m 90% done in that process with my ihug acct. It’s not fun.
Make sure you set gmail or similar secondary backup with your domain registrar