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.
Rules:
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.
Resources:
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
I've thought about rolling my own email service, but I'm hesitant given the risk of it inadvertently nuking the rest of my network. There's a lot of work needed to keep the thing secure, and even if you do everything right there's a good chance you get SMTP traffic blocked because other services are worried about unknown accidentally hosting spammer networks.
Plus given my prior track record, there is a $1000% chance I screw up the DNS entries for any mail servers I set up.
I use https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver with sendgrid.com as an SMTP relay (recieving emails is easy, sending them successfully is a pain)
Gotta say, I’m really happy to see so many people here actually talking about doing it! Usually I see a lot of fear-mongering about self hosting email. You can do it, though, and I think we should encourage more people to do so! It can be a little tricky to set up at first because there’s a lot of different things you need to configure and make talk to each other — I haven’t used them but there’s things like mail-in-a-box that are supposed to make this easier. But the most important thing is to make sure you set up SPF, DMARC, and DKIM DNS records (and set up DKIM signing for your outgoing messages). I’d recommend setting the ruf and rua tags in the DMARC record so you get mailed reports from other mail servers (can help you debug if your mail is getting rejected). I’d also use these tools:
https://www.mail-tester.com/ https://www.learndmarc.com/
Happy mailing :)
Thank you for the encouragement! I am inching my way towards building a server, and I am thankful for all the tips and suggestions I got.
I am starting to think that if email is the hardest to self-host, then perhaps more people should try it. It is worthy to take regain indepedence and autonomy of technology, even if it seen as a lost cause.
Yeah, I hope to get something running soon, just so I can say I did it.
I did but I stopped. My server had everything set up (DKIM, DMARC, SPF, Spam filtering) but I gave up after some providers wanted me to jump through hoops to get my mail delivered. Also I never had enough outgoing mail to build some reputation.
I run a complete ISP style setup with multiple domains. I run it from a rented server at Hetzner, so i don't have problems with being black listed for sending from a consumer IP.
Nice! I appreciate the guide! Even if I end up using a premade solution, knowing how everything works will help me be smarter about the choices I make.
Thank you.
I want to do a setup where i use mailcow at home for receiving emails but Amazon ses SMTP for sending, it's possible? Looks like it is, but i didn't investigate it
there are many replies saying similar things, but don't be discouraged from try it out. i host my own with mailinabox on a vm from a cloud provider. no spam issues. the only wildcard was spending a few months getting my ip address off google's spam filters. it is so worth it, i own my own email/calendar/contacts/notes/todo list/ AND website solution. all with mailinabox. completely disconnected from google etc.
The more I learn about FOSS the more I understand it is just not about using open auditable software, but about having complete ownership of the technology a person uses. I need to learn these things.
Did you ever manage to get off hotmail/outlook spam filters? I ran my own server for years and had no issues with gmail, but was never able to reliably send to hotmail. That was the nail in the coffin in the end as so many businesses I communicate with were on outlook and my mail would always goto spam causing endless issues.
I run my own email server using Mailcow. It works well.
However, I do not even attempt to directly send outbound email. It's very difficult to get your server trusted by the major providers, especially Microsoft (who are very picky about email servers). I have an account with MXRoute (which is an email provider) but only use it for outbound relaying. Inbound emails go directly to my server.
For what it's worth, MXRoute is a great provider to consider if you want to move away from the large ones (Google, Microsoft, etc) but don't want to self-host.
I don't. But I do have my domain and use a hosted solution, so I'm kind of independent and own my data.
That sounds like the right middle ground for me. I know for sure my home network is not as secure as it could be, especially since I live with people who need everything online to work without obstacles. I can't even install PiHole.
But, hosting is probably more affordable in a year than the amount I might spend on coffee in a week. And I typically make my own coffee.