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Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

I run lots of servers and I'm very confident with Linux and systems admin.

The one service I really hate running is email - I found it very hard to configure and run reliably. There's so many interrelated systems and potential things that can go wrong and the outcome is lost email which isn't acceptable.

I'm happy to run a local server for literally any other service.

In the end I decided that it's well worth it to pay someone else to do email.

I use Amazon Workmail which works really well and it easy to set up.

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I would never self-host email based on what I saw during the portion of my career as a web hosting Linux sysadmin. At one point I half-seriously offered to pay for Gmail for Business for all our customers out of my paycheck.

Email is THE crucial link in the internet identity chain. It NEEDS to both work always AND be secure. Two things that frequently weren't the case in web hosting.

I've worked in hosting since 99 and I fully agree with you. I currently work at a Managed WordPress host that only offers web hosting. No email, not even DNS. It's a beautiful thing, believe me!

> There's so many interrelated systems and potential things that can go wrong and the outcome is lost email

This is a common misconception. There really aren't that many moving pieces, and smtp is one of the more forgiving protocols in use on the internet (it's default failure mode is to retry again later)

Sure, a person can pay Amazon to host their email (and harvest their data) but that's the opposite of the spirit of this article.

>> and harvest their data

I don't believe Amazon accesses my Workmail email. I'm aware cynics might believe otherwise.

There really aren't that many moving pieces, and smtp is one of the more forgiving protocols in use on the internet

I think the moving pieces are on the other side and the person you're trying to email doesn't know what those pieces are -- even if you can see that their mail server is rejecting your email, that person doesn't usually know who to talk to to find out why. Even if you can convince them to open a support ticket with IT, their first level IT support doesn't know what to do either, you'll get responses like "Our IT department wants to know what version of Outlook you're using? And they said you should trying rebooting your computer".

I used to run Qmail on my private server and it was great, very secure, pretty easy to set up for my use case. And even configuring and training spam assassin wasn't too hard and it worked well.

But like many people, what made me finally give up was mail delivery issues. I used to run email on a home server, and those IP's were blacklisted by many providers long ago, then I moved to EC2 until those IP's were blacklisted to. Finally I colocated a small server which worked fine for a while until neighbors in my subnet kept getting me blacklisted.

Finally I got too frustrated with undelivered or silently dropped emails and just moved everything to Google GSuite.

There are good open source solutions that wrap all required services into an almost fire and forget docker setup, like Mailcow.

Actually DNS too - I'd rather use Amazon's Route53 for DNS than run my own DNS server.

Authoritative DNS server is very easy to run. (I use knot) I run several just because it's so easy. I don't use DNSSSEC though, because I haven't found a use case for it.

Especially since you can run hidden root or whatever it’s called and have the NS servers actually be secondaries for the main servers they replicate (and maybe not even be on for more than some transfers).

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