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Comment by gerdesj | Hacker News Reader

"Self-hosting email fully is tedious/unnecessary"

If you IT, why do you particularly consider self hosting email as tedious?

I self-host e-mail, because I am stubborn - I have done it for 20 years. I would not recommend anyone do it if they aren't already, or if they well-and-truly want to be on call for their homelab.

So as not to reiterate, here's an HN comment where I described the most recent trial I endured with it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46297991

In the last 20 years, I've also run into problems like:

* My brand-new ISP wouldn't allow TCP port 25 inbound, and wouldn't relent. I had to go back to the old ISP.

* SPF became mandatory at Gmail, but I didn't get the memo, and Google started bouncing my mail one random day.

* My residential IP ended up on a "policy blacklist", one it could never get off because it's blacklisted by virtue of being a residential IP, not that it did something bad.

I host my email, my isp blocked mail ports too, my simple and reliant solution is to use 2 quite cheap VPS on different zones as front email servers, with haproxy and postfix forwarding, took some time to setup but works great and not dependent on isp rules.

I've never tried to set it up even though I know it can easily be done with things like mailcow.

The downside is never really knowing if your email reached your recipient (maybe it got blocked by Gmail because of your IP, maybe some other reason). If I use Gmail/proton etc, then I can be pretty sure that the other person got my email.

You'll know from bounced email and logs, which you should have monitoring setup on.

It's not trivial to run your own email stack, but it's not hard either. It's more tedious than anything. Once it's up and running, it's low-maintenance. And it's fairly trivial to avoid spam. I get vastly more spam in my Gmail than I do on my self-hosted domains.

The biggest challenge with self-hosted email is getting an IP address that's not blocked or carrying low reputation. Most VPS IPs from e.g. Digital Ocean, Linode, Hetzner, AWS, etc. are going to get blocked from Google (the strictest) and Yahoo, Hotmail/Live/MS, etc. Cloud providers often block incoming and outgoing mail ports, too. I have a Digital Ocean VPS and my account is old enough to be grandfathered into the old policy, which means my email ports aren't blocked. I used to have no trouble sending email anywhere from my VPS, until I downsized it and got stuck with an IP in a bad reputation CIDR. Now I use smtp2go for relaying outbound mail, but still handle all inbound mail. 10/10 score on mail-tester.com, and I never have any problems or need to do any maintenance.

A few major vendors (I want to say Microsoft was among them) were infamous for silently dropping email without bounce backs. They'd perform then whole protocol sequence as if they accepted the email, then simply never actually put it in that user's inbox or even spam folder.

People should read the parent post and stop spreading FUD about email. The only part that isn't easy is the IP requirement. If you don't have a fixed public IP, preferably v4, then self-hosting email is out of reach, but so is hosting other things like game servers. It's the main cost of self-hosting, and one that isn't big relative to all the benefits. Privacy is the biggest one I think, and so is the ability to create unlimited aliases, one for each company/website.

Dynamic DNS clients are a thing. I host a bunch of stuff on my domain, the only issues I have are related to having a local address when I'm at home. I don't host game servers much, but I hosted terraria (tshock) for few a few years.

You can't really host email with dynamic DNS. At least not well. You need stable MX records, you need various other DNS records for SPF/DMARC/DKIM, and most of all you need an IP address with a positive reputation. If you go changing your MX record constantly, you're not going to be receiving email reliably, if at all.

It's fine for casual game servers for friends.

Because it's not about setting it up, it's about not getting outgoing mail perceived as spam by someone. Borderline impossible without scale. Even doing everything correct is not enough.

and yet I manage to do it for multiple domains, for over 20 years in the UK.

Congratulations, your IP isn't considered smelly. Let me just change my IP entirely. Oh wait, that's tedious as fuck.

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