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.
dgriffith@aussie.zone 6 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 6 months ago
I use FreeBSD so used the guide here:
www.purplehat.org/?page_id=4
Sadly it is a little outdated and 1 step will fail right now until a new package is committed in to the FreeBSD repo (HTMLPurifier) which was removed as it was PHP7 only for a while.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.