I’m going to start off but saying I know that self-hosting email can be a bad idea. That being said, I’m trying to de-googlfy my life and would like to experiment.
I have a VPS and a domain that doesn’t get used for much at the moment. I’d like to try configuring a full mail suite on that domain and see if I can make it work. I’ve been looking into the various options on this list and was hoping for some feed back on options that people have used. If this works out it would be fairly low volume.
Ideally I’d like a full solution that includes web administration if at all possible. I think I’m leaning towards mailcow but it might be overkill.
I’d appreciate any input on what has or hasn’t worked for people. Thanks.
johntash@eviltoast.org 1 year ago
Consider still using sendgrid, AWS ses, or some other service for outbound mail. Incoming email isn’t bad, but outgoing email is where your more likely to run into issues with your IP being blacklisted/etc
jemikwa@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 year ago
Definitely listen to this. IP Warming is a very real problem and you have to send thousands of messages for most email gateways to 1) Mark you as a proper email sender, and 2) classify you as a reputable one that isn’t sending spam. Using a public/private cloud IP isn’t enough, it should be a service already used for mail sending.
If you self host email, make sure it isn’t at home. ISPs often block SMTP traffic to keep people from spamming others from their home. A lot of IP blocklists also auto block home IPs so you may not ever get your messages delivered.
lily33@lemm.ee 1 year ago
What do you mean thousands at glacial pace? I don’t think I’ve sent 1000 emails offer the last year. And even if some people send more, I can’t imagine it would be at a pace where that becomes a problem (at least if it’s for personal use)…
brygphilomena@lemmy.world 1 year ago
My more recent experience has been this comes from using residential ISP IPs or cloud provider IPs. These are almost always just permanently in a grey list because AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, and digital ocean instances are so quick, cheap, and easy to setup and cycle through IPs on.
SciPiTie@iusearchlinux.fyi 1 year ago
Just curious is there any recent quantitative source to this? That statement was “common wisdom” already 20 years ago - 10 years ago I decided to just give it a try - and had issues three times in ten years, all three with missconfigured exchange servers.
And I’m not with a high profile provider either.
Just to make sure: I’m not claiming that you’re wrong, I’m simply curious on how lucky exactly I got!
SeeJayEmm@lemmy.procrastinati.org 1 year ago
100% agree. I probably should have said this in the OP but I already outbound relay to SES for messages that get generated within my home network (alerts and whatnot).
lily33@lemm.ee 1 year ago
If you have a VPS with dedicated IP, why would it be blacklisted?
jemikwa@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 year ago
Short answer, likely yes. It’s not definitive, you could still slip by after sending enough mail, but you are also very likely to get whacked because that VPS doesn’t have an email sending reputation.
Longer answer, email gateways like Google, Microsoft, and Proofpoint don’t really care who owns what IP. Well, they might, but they’re more concerned about the sending habits of an IP. While you might send good mail from that IP, there’s no reputation for it, so you could be whacked for having a neutral reputation (the ol’ credit score dilemma but for email). In order to have a good reputation, you have to send a large volume of messages very gradually over several weeks to “warm” your IP as a reputable sender. I went over this slightly more in detail in another reply, but this article is pretty concise on how you could do this with a dedicated IP at a provider like SendGrid: docs.sendgrid.com/ui/…/warming-up-an-ip-address