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Comment by abdullahkhalids | Hacker News Reader

Here is my advice to anyone wanting to test out self-hosting email. Start by using your self-hosted email to sign-up for accounts. You don't have to use the email address for your personal correspondence

Use Mail-in-a-box to get started [1]. You can literally set it up in a couple of hours by following the instructions and everything should just work.

After a few years, you can think about switching your personal correspondence to your new email.

[1] https://mailinabox.email./

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I can recommend Stalwart [1] which is a complete mail service contained in a single binary, that doesn't really have any external dependencies, and is really easy to install and update.

I've looked (and tried) a few other projects in the past, but Stalwart was the easiest to setup, and I haven't had any issues with it so far.

[1] https://github.com/stalwartlabs/stalwart

It’s also what Thunderbird is using to build their paid email hosting. Seems like a very ambitious project mostly done by a single person – impressive!

Wow! I was just about to comment how email is the one thing where I wish something that didn't follow the unix philosophy existed. Exactly due to this, it is easy to set up a mail server but it is hard to think of all the things around it: spam, fishing, dmarc, dkim, spf, etc.

This looks really nice, especially also for saas projects.

I'm not looking to self-host my email, but this looks fantastic. It's making me reconsider the decision, hm. Thank you for this.

Has anyone compared Stalwart with say Mox or Maddy, in practice?

They all look about the same from a newb's perspective.

I've been running MIAB for a few years now with generally good success as an outgoing sender using a rented cloud machine and a "clean" reputation IP. I've had to email the Microsoft postmaster on one occasion when my emails weren't reaching Outlook users, but they were surprisingly helpful and it's been working fine for years now. It's a good learning exercise in setting up stuff like DKIM/SPF/DMARC.

That said - receiving account sign-up emails is the absolute biggest pain in the backside with Mailinabox! The greylisting anti-spam feature relies on bouncing unknown senders and waiting for a retry. The trouble is, many legit sites just don't bother retrying. So email verification for new accounts and 2FA-type stuff often takes ages to come through, if at all. MIAB stubbornly has no easy, mail user-facing way to temporarily disable spam filtering and it's a real PITA at times.

Oh! That's what it is. I just thought some websites just took longer to send an email to my unknown domain.

I see that the only way to disable greylisting is to configure the underlying tool [1]. But it also means that SPAM will increase a lot.

[1] https://discourse.mailinabox.email/t/how-to-turn-off-edit-gr...

It's better to whitelist the domains you'll be getting mfa from.

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