Why You May Not Want to Run Your Own Mail Server

For me it's the fear of DNS/domain hijacking, theft and other things I don't know much about (the whole infrastructure).

E-mail is central to my online identity and a dedicated attacker could make my life a living hell if he got hold of my domain, even if only by a few hours. That's the real scary stuff, getting your ip blacklisted is nothing compared to that.

I know about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15855081, ironically I'm not afraid of losing my Gmail the same way since it's impossible to talk to a Google-human.

one of the problems with staying off blacklists, is that unless your smtpd is hosted at a very attentive ISP (not a bulk VM/VPS host), blacklists can encompass the entire /24 of IPs that your single server resides in. You have no control over the abuse of other VM/VPS tenants with adjacent IPs in the same block and may never successfully get it taken off some RBLs.

If you are thinking of running your own mail server I would recommend mailcow

https://mailcow.email

It installs very quickly with Docker and is very simple to configure.

I used to run my own Zimbra email server - it was slow, kept crashing, and had all sorts of weird issues. It also was less than straightforward to get going.

I jumped over to iRedMail and LOVE it. exactly what I wanted. Super fast to get going, easy to config.

It's true getting things setup can be a pain though - with DNS and all that. But you can use mxtoolbox to resolve them - but it can take some work.

Still, I love having mail on my own server. Being able to spin up new domains and easily add email is great. Not having to pay for anything but the hosting is appealing too.

Just use Google Apps or FastMail.