this post was submitted on 04 May 2025
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Hey all, i've decided I should probably setup something else to help block nefarious IP addresses. I've been looking into CrowdSec and Fail2Ban but i'm not really sure the best one to use.

My setup is OpnSense -> Nginx Proxy Manager -> Servers. I think I need to setup CrowdSec/Fail2Ban on the Nginx Proxy Manager to filter the access logs, then ideally it would setup the blocks on OpnSense - but i'm not sure that can be done?

Any experience in a setup like this? I've found a few guides but some of them seem fairly outdated.

Edit: thanks everybody for the great info. General consensus seems to be with crowdsec so I'll go down that path and see how it goes.

Edit 2: So after having it up and running for the better part of a day, i'm going to remove it again. For some reason there was a performance impact loading websites, probably because it was waiting for a response from the Crowdsec hub? Either way, after stopping it from running everything is back to normal again. So I might revisit how I do it and probably try Fail2Ban now instead. Thanks everybody

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[–] catloaf@lemm.ee -5 points 1 day ago (2 children)

It doesn't, but I wouldn't recommend selfhosting email for a small org. The low price of Office 365 or whatever Google is calling their business product now is far cheaper than the anguish of running your own server and dealing with spam, both incoming and making sure there's none outgoing, and making sure your recipient servers aren't considering your spam.

[–] maniacalmanicmania@aussie.zone 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Our small mail server is doing OK. Incoming spam is an issue but not a massive problem. Outgoing spam doesn't exist. Once a year the IP ends up on the Microsoft blocklist but using the deliverability form to submit mitigation requests is easy enough and takes half a day or so to sort out.

I'm looking forward to seeing what the Thunderbird team does with Stalwart.

That reminds me I've been meaning to spin up a server, install Stalwart and test it out.

[–] jrgd@lemm.ee 2 points 1 day ago

If you're running an email server for more than a handful of persistent users, I'd probably agree. However, there are self-host solutions that do a decent job of being 'all-in-one' (MailU, Mailcow, Docker-Mailserver) that can help perform a lot of input filtering.

If your small org just needs automation emails (summaries, password resets), it's definitely feasible to do actually, as long as you have port 25 available in addition to 465, 587 and you can assign PTR records on reverse DNS. Optionally you should use a common TLD for your domain as it will be less likely to be flagged via SpamAssassin. MXToolbox and Mail-Tester together offer free services to help test the reliability of your email functionality.