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Comment by lazyweb | Hacker News Reader

Somewhat relevant, my experience with running a small private mail server.

https://jschumacher.info/2021/05/running-a-private-mail-serv...

My experience is similar. I’ve been running my own for about 12 years, for my own own personal email + a few other individuals and a couple of very small companies. I also use postfix + Dovecot (I'm impressed by the quality of those programs). I replaced Spamassassin a few years ago by a handful of procmail rules, which reduces CPU usage a bit. My setup handles a couple of hundred email per day, and I rarely have to pay any attention to it.

That was a good article, and your site seems to have a lot of useful information. Does it have an RSS feed?

> I replaced Spamassassin a few years ago by a handful of procmail rules, which reduces CPU usage a bit.

rspamd is worth checking out as an alternative to SA if you need something more advanced than procmail.

Thanks for the suggestion. A dozen or so spam emails still get through to my inbox every day. But that’s still better than using something like Gmail and missing real emails because of false positives.

Most Wordpress sites have a default one at /feed/ so in this case you can use: https://jschumacher.info/feed/

Thanks, that works.

Thanks for sharing. I keep getting closer and closer to wanting to stand up my own mail server, but research always leads to "it's not worth it" posts, and it's nice to have a realistic point of view that is also pretty up to date. I also didn't know about mail-tester.com, which I'm adding to my toolbox.

It is not worth it if you need to send marketing campaigns in hundreds of mails per day or transactional email in hundreds that really needs to be delivered to corporate email boxes of "joe@megacorp.com".

For my personal e-mail most of the time I am just on receiving end. For receiving e-mail I don't see much problem. For receiving email only you don't need to setup any of the DKIM/SPF/DMARC stuff.

Occasionally I send some e-mail out but you are not going to be marked as spammer if you sent 1 e-mail a week from your IP address. Most likely it will be delivered and accepted by whatever provider receiving person is using, might be marked as spam - but well you probably can call up that person and ask them to check spam folder.

For spam - don't put your email into every web page that asks you to do it and you should be good. My gmail account that is now ~20 years old started to receive loads of spam only last year when email lists from various leaks started to go around internet. My other email accounts that get loads of spam are on shitty providers that send their own spam.

The realization that my Gmail is nearing 20 years old was not a reminder I was prepared for today. If it's that old, how old I must be now. :-\

I'm similar to your boat, so this is just one more reason I'm going to give it a go, I think. It'll take time to move the stuff I care about off Gmail anyway, so I can sort out the spam stuff as I go. And I'd really like the flexibility of controlling my mail in ways I can't really right now with a hosted provider anyway.

I have been considering it over and over.

For a time i DID host my own emails. Out of my house, with a business line and static IP.

Google Apps was free at the time and I registered my domain and over time that has become the easiest (its still free for me because i grandfathered in back in like...2014.)

With that said, more and more I want my own privacy and control. And VPS services are cheap. Im leaning toward moving to Mail in a Box or something similar to what OP talked about in his blog. Its really just me and my wife so not much volume. Could probably host it on Linode no problem.

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