Mail servers?
How are you finding that these days? I thought all the anti-spam stuff meant that self-hosted email was just not worth it these days?
this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2025
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On residential connections it's a bit pain in the rear, but if you get VPS (or something similar) it's perfectly manageable. You just need to maintain stuff properly, like having proper DNS records, and occasionally clear false positives from spam lists. The bigger issue is to have proper backups and precautions, I've hosted my own emails for over 10 years and should I lose all the data and ability to receive new messages it would be a massive personal problem.
I also have a mail filter, I have been hosting my own mail server for the last 25 years.
Out of interest what are you using? I was postfix/courier for a long time, with a must migrate to dovecot 10 years ago. Finally migrated this year and the performance difference is noticeable
I recently moved to Mailcow, it's a one in all solution. My spam filter is Proxmox mail gateway, also very user friendly.
Not really. Postfix is very robust against attackers and knows to how to deal with bots by default. It makes sense to also configure SPF, DKIM and DMARC for your own safety.
If you want to stop the attackers from hammering, you can also add fail2ban.
If you want to avoid spam, you can attach a spamfilter to the delivery agent and let Sieve do the rest.
I've been running my postfix/dovecot combo using 4 mail domains for over 5 years without any problems. It's simply fantastic.
It is hard to set up and you might need an SMTP relay since most ISPs close port 25. But it is feasible.
It’s not worth it but some people don’t mind the cost.
What cost?
Real email security gateways cost money. There’s no good way to deal with it at small scale.
They don't have to cost money. The mail filter appliances are all based on postfix, spamassassin and a virus scanner like clamav. The thing you pay for is the nice gui.
If only that were true.
It is, I looked at several vendor's and it's all te same except for the nice gui. They all have their own blacklist that they feed with the spam/ham queries from their devices.
I genuinely don't understand what you are paying for. I must have missed something.
Depends what you mean by "security"
I have 3 locations right now:
- Hetzner cloud (1 server)
- Home (my PC and a raspberry Pi)
- My parents house (a raspberry Pi)
I have most of those things on https://uptime.jeena.net/status/everything
It says jeena.net is up but I get a 504.
After a minute, it works again.
Do you have like an on demand server that spins up the containers when a request comes in?
No, I'm running everything on one server, there is sometimes a lot going on on PieFed and the load gets too much so it times out. I haven't had the time to research it.
And it says on, just because I set it to retry some times.
I have VPSes at Hetzner for Mastodon and Bookwyrm. I'm also using Hetzner nameservers with pseudo DynDNS.
Mail is managed by 1blu with my domain.
Everything else is at home. I would move at least bookwyrm into my home server, but there's another admin involved and I'd need to give them limited access to the VM and Proxmox (backup/snapshots/rebuild when doing maintenance).
I have everything at home, including the mail server. The only third party to my setup is a SMTP relay. All on an Odroid H4+. With a backup server on a Raspberry Pi 4 at my daughter's.
I got a VPS sometime ago just to host a Breezewiki instance because the public ones were down all the time. Then I enjoyed the process so started to host a bunch of other stuff as well:
- Technitium DNS server
- Wallos
- Miniflux
I'm now working on a backup routine and an alert system for the DNS server (had to make it public so I want to monitor closely for any unknown activity).
I have a raspberry at home as well to host a few services that I only want to use here:
- Technitium DNS server which (this one private for my internal network)
- PairDrop
- SpeedTest