I have been thinking of completely going off Google. I have a Nextcloud server for documents and contacts and calendar. Thinking of moving mail away too. Currently I am conflicted between hosting my own email server. On searching only advice I am getting is not to do it.
How many of the homelabers do host their own email server? What software do you use? Any tips.
I use Mailcow Dockerized with no issues. But I’ve also ran email servers for 3 decades personally and professionally. If you try it, I would start out with a completely different domain and be prepared to be down for a long time while you figure out how to appease the anti-spam gods with things like SPF, DKIM, DMARC and DNS issues.
Been hosting my own email in my home with Exchange Server for almost 2 decades. I don’t recommend it unless you have experience and a MSDN account though.
Email used to be easy, but with all the anti spam and trust setup required these days it’s a bit more difficult for the inexperienced. You’re going to need to know DNS, SMTP, certificates, and have a plan for message hygiene (anti spam / anti malware).
That said, if you want to do it and can suffer some issues while you’re learning, go for it. That’s how you get experience. :)
Outgoing mail is hard because no one will your trust your server, the easy way is let someone else send your mail.
People get stressed about your receiving server being down sometimes, but this actually not a big deal. Mail senders typically will try for 48 hours or so to deliver mail, and if it doesn’t get delivered it will be sent back to the sender with a “could not be delivered” message. Very little gets actually lost.
Exim and Dovecot. With a clean IP on a VPS and SPF, DKIM and DMARC I haven’t really encountered any problems yet. Though I’m only doing it for about 2 years.
This is the way. Exim is far easier to config than Postfix, which is what I’m using now. I’d run Exim before for years, but thought I’d try Postfix since it’s the popular kid. It was a mistake, but everything is running and stable, and… well, sunk costs is keeping me from reconfiguring my set-up.
It’s a bit of effort to get everything configured correctly in any case, because of the number of moving parts. SPF and DMARC on the DNS entries, dovecot, Postfix or Exim, and a spam manager. Spam management consumes a huge amount of resources.
I ran my own email server about 10-ish years ago for a while on a Linode using Postfix and Dovecot similar to what others have mentioned. Took some effort to prevent GMail from just flagging everything I sent as spam, but I was eventually able to do it. I remember having to configure something particular with DNS records. (An SPF TXT record, probably?)
I didn't end up using it very much and shut it down after a couple years, but it was a good exercise and I learned a lot from doing it.
I used to use postfix, dovecot, spamassassin. I then moved from dovecot to exchange for better web client and sharing capabilities. I got fed up with the constant chasing of patches for Exchange that needed more than just an installer, they needed reg fixes, DNS updates, certificate changes etc. I ended up moving my family to 365 with free licenses to spare me the hassle.
I do, a bit differently from what’s been mentioned here so far:
I actually host my server at home, running mailcow as my email-server-software of choice, and incoming emails do get delivered directly to my ISP-assigned IP via dynamically updated DNS records.
However: Outgoing email is delivered via an SMTP relay service, specifically Mailgun (I like them because for normal everyday email volume it’s free), because even when I was hosting the email server in a datacenter, it was impossible to not encounter deliverability issues.
I self host it on my Synology NAS at home, using their MailPlus server and clients. It definitely took some time to get it up and running, but now it works without issue and very little maintenance required. My domain provider also acts as backup mx (for when the NAS is offline) and SMTP relay (for sending IP reputation), and the NAS does a daily encrypted cloud backup so nothing can be lost.
The one pain point I have is spam blocking. It does a good job blocking most of the spam, but it’s not as good as something like Gmail unfortunately. I have to add custom keyword filters from time to time, and I still get 1-2 spam mails every day that make it past the spam filter. There are paid services to filter out spam, but I think it’s not really worth it in my case.
Here is a breakdown of the costs I posted the other day. I’d pay for the NAS, domain and backup service anyway, so the email self hosting is basically free.
I run iRedMail (a collection of dovecot, postfix etc, plus sogo and roundcube web clients and managed by a nice web frontend, all open source and runs on any linux.
I’ve run for about 8 years, no dramas other than my isp technocally doesnt allow it. But they don’t block anything and occasionally they submit their ip ranges for customers to places like spamhaus, so i just script check every month to see if they added my ip back, then i just submit removal, it takes all of 30sec. (IP is semi static, probably changes once every 9 months or so, so not a drama to update dkim on my domain registrar.)
Yes, self-hosting my email server since 2 years without issues so far. I only send a handful of emails per month but haven’t stumbled into any issues of being blocked by any big provider, even the ones that are known to block small email servers here in Germany. I enjoy the flexibility of as many aliases and distribution groups as I want for the family and being able to configure the anti-spam-component the way it works best for us.
I run everything on a small VPS at a known provider and checked the IP against block lists. It was indeed listed on one but I never had issues and when checking again a few days ago it wasn’t listed on any list anymore.
First I tried the available all-in-one solutions but troubleshooting is hard if you don’t know each component.
So, I followed this guide but moved all components in their own docker containers instead of installing natively to be more failsafe regarding system upgrades:
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