Hey-ho 👋
What is the best approach for selfhosting an email server with static IP or blocked port 25?
I’ve done it many times in many different ways, now doing it again and want to hear what is the best approach these days
My port 25 isn’t even probably blocked, I just prefer to use my vps to help it with this stuff
Any suggestions?
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Hosting email with mailcow dockerized worked pretty good on my netcup vps, but before you go into hosting email ask yourself a few questions:
- Will you use your selfhosted mail for important things? (Banking, official correspondence and so on)
- Can you promise a near 100% uptime? Otherwise, some email might not reach you.
- How important is the Mail you send? Some (stupid) Blocklists generally block all IP ranges that are sold out by vps companies and other kinds of IAAS.
- If you register any accounts with your selfhosted mail, can you guarantee yourself that your email account is secure? Don’t underestimate what an attacker can do with a compromised Mail account.
I personally ended up scrapping my email server eventually. Nowadays I pay a company to do the mail hosting, you just need to set some DNS records and they do everything else. Personally, I’m with proton, but there are many good alternatives.
Ya I had to bail on hosting email, getting off of block lists and verifying that people even get your outbound email is near impossible at this point.
As i said i already have experience of hosting email, many different ways, etc
Will you use your selfhosted mail for important things? (Banking, official correspondence and so on)
I’m barely using email because have really few services that require an email (foss and selfhosting evangelism)
Can you promise a near 100% uptime? Otherwise, some email might not reach you.
I can promise you anything under these stars. And some of it would be true because my specialization is 0 downtime systems
How important is the Mail you send? Some (stupid) Blocklists generally block all IP ranges that are sold out by vps companies and other kinds of IAAS.
Never had any problems with the big hosters like do, linode, vultr, hetzner
If you register any accounts with your selfhosted mail, can you guarantee yourself that your email account is secure? Don’t underestimate what an attacker can do with a compromised Mail account.
Selfhosting for many years, never got hacked because I take security seriously
Nowadays I pay a company to do the mail hosting
I’m trying not to pay companies when not necessary, and especially not for a “setup service”
Alright, you seem to have a good grasp on what you’re doing. Good luck have fun. I really hope it works for you.
Can you promise a near 100% uptime? Otherwise, some email might not reach you. Just lol. Mail get queued just fine by everyone. If you really concern , setup second MX.
I’ve setup my email via a VPN to my own server.
- DNS, mail, business web, cusromer web on VPSes (2, 1 primary, 1 secondary DNS only)
- Personal email, incoming and outgoing via VPS, personal websites (all static) on local system (RPi 4 8GB)
This gives the advantage that your outgoing email always comes from the VPS ip address (pick a VPS provider that is trusted) and when your line is down, incoming email is cached on your VPS. It’s a tad of double work, but pretty secure. Even connecting to my employer to work from home is not a big issue. (and that connection is limited to it’s own vlan)
Also, with this method, you can route the mail into your network via port 26 when 25 is blocked or even set an outgoing vpn to your VPS and route the email that way. You’ll be provider independent at home. (I even have a private ipv6 /48 via a tunnel broker)
You’ll need to work a lot on your knowledge though, without DNSSEC, SPF, DKIM and DMARC the big 2 (Google and hotmail) will refuse your email.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System IMAP Internet Message Access Protocol for email IP Internet Protocol NAT Network Address Translation POP3 Post Office Protocol v3, for email; contrast IMAP RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC SBC Single-Board Computer SMTP Simple Mail Transfer Protocol VPN Virtual Private Network VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
9 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 9 acronyms.
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