I’m going to start off but saying I know that self-hosting email can be a bad idea. That being said, I’m trying to de-googlfy my life and would like to experiment.
I have a VPS and a domain that doesn’t get used for much at the moment. I’d like to try configuring a full mail suite on that domain and see if I can make it work. I’ve been looking into the various options on this list and was hoping for some feed back on options that people have used. If this works out it would be fairly low volume.
Ideally I’d like a full solution that includes web administration if at all possible. I think I’m leaning towards mailcow but it might be overkill.
I’d appreciate any input on what has or hasn’t worked for people. Thanks.
Consider still using sendgrid, AWS ses, or some other service for outbound mail. Incoming email isn’t bad, but outgoing email is where your more likely to run into issues with your IP being blacklisted/etc
Definitely listen to this. IP Warming is a very real problem and you have to send thousands of messages at a very gradual rate for most email gateways to 1) mark you as a proper email sender, and 2) classify you as a reputable one that isn’t sending spam. Using a public/private cloud IP isn’t enough, it should be a service already used for mail sending.
If you self host sending email and ignore using a service for outbound, make sure it isn’t at home. ISPs often block SMTP traffic to keep people from spamming others from their home. A lot of IP blocklists also auto block home IPs so you may not ever get your messages delivered.
Make sure to set up SPF/DKIM/DMARC. At the very least SPF, DKIM if the platform supports it, and ideally all three or SPF+DMARC. It’s not that hard to configure if you do it as you go instead of years down the line after you have a dozen services sending mail as your domain.
What do you mean thousands at a very gradual rate? I don’t think I’ve sent 1000 emails offer the last year. And even if some people send more, I can’t imagine it would be at a pace where that becomes a problem (at least if it’s for personal use)…
Just curious is there any recent quantitative source to this? That statement was “common wisdom” already 20 years ago - 10 years ago I decided to just give it a try - and had issues three times in ten years, all three with missconfigured exchange servers.
And I’m not with a high profile provider either.
Just to make sure: I’m not claiming that you’re wrong, I’m simply curious on how lucky exactly I got!
100% agree. I probably should have said this in the OP but I already outbound relay to SES for messages that get generated within my home network (alerts and whatnot).
My more recent experience has been this comes from using residential ISP IPs or cloud provider IPs. These are almost always just permanently in a grey list because AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, and digital ocean instances are so quick, cheap, and easy to setup and cycle through IPs on.
My colo provided IP block hasn’t had any issues sending emails.
If you have a VPS with dedicated IP they you (and only you) have used for a while, would it still be blacklisted?