Selfhosted
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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I’ve been hosting my own email servers for 20 years without issue. But email systems were a huge part of my IT career so it was easy.
It works great if you have static IPs and know what you’re doing in terms of following best practices. If you’re missing those two things you’re going to have a bad time.
If you have the statics and want to learn, I’d recommend purchasing a test domain and getting the kinks worked out before you move a domain you care about to your own system.
Any wisdoms to share?
Yeah, don’t do it.
Lol. After professionally hosting email for 15 years I’m happy to let someone else handle it now.
About 90% of incoming mail will be spam and it will be your job to make sure you are doing good job of classifying it so you don’t get junk in your inbox and don’t lose real mail in the spam folder.
Then for outgoing mail you need to make sure SPF, DKIM and DMARC are all in order.
Then there is all the usual stuff of security updates, backups, monitoring, alerting, logging and having a plan for internet outages.
Yes, it’s all doable but I won’t expect it be “set and forget”. I expect there will be quite a bit of tuning with some possible spam and delivery problems while you get kinks worked out.
I really like the idea of having my own server, where I could have a bunch of cool stuff like email, VPN, Nextcloud, and so much more. The primary reason why I don’t have a server like that, is because I can’t trust myself to follow the best practices. For a while now, I’ve been thinking that I should hire a proper professional to take care of all that.
My hosting company has an outgoing mail server that I can use and as long as they’re doing the external DNS of the domain in question it works perfectly well.
Mostly though, from my own domain I am only sending automated messages from applications I host like NextCloud or Grafana from a “no-reply” address. There would almost certainly be privacy implications if I were to use it for personal mail.
So, if yoy are looking for a simple way to get email notifications from automated processes, this ain’t a bad way to go about it. If you want more, I would consider who can ready your outgoing mail and if you are ok with that.