My advice after doing it for 13+ years is - don't do it.
Finding a hosting provider that gives you a clean class C to run out of is almost impossible. Every VPS has tenants who spam, and every provider will be flagged in one way or another. You will spend a bunch of time trying to white-list/make your mail server behave to ensure delivery to the google/microsoft mail servers, and some systems will just ban your email anyways.
It got to the point where I would send an email to someone, and then follow up with a phone call because I was not confident mail would be delivered as expected.
I found a hosting provider dedicated to e-mail (Migadu actually), and switched everything over to that and haven't realistically had to worry about maintaining a mail server since
I have self hosted side 2001, mostly opensuse, with postfix, but the IMAP etc has changed over the years, now using dovecot. Yes its a pain, yes it takes effort, but just like some people spend there spare time painting, I run my own email server.
Mail-in-a-box (https://mailinabox.email) on Ubuntu Server which installs Postfix, Dovecot, nsd, NextCloud, RoundCube, nginx, spam assasin, postgrey ... and a good admin panel.
Mine runs on an Intel NUC at home, with the a sensible ISP who naturally can provide a fixed IP address (everything open), IPv6, and clean address.
Been very happy with it, both the software, and the independence :) A little IT and network knowledge is useful if you're doing more than the standard (VPS) install, but that's to be expected.
However, my server went down many, many times for hours without me noticing, sometimes for days.
Despite today's outage, it's still more than worth having a third-party company like Google or Microsoft handle your email. At least they have monitoring 24/7 and people on call to fix issues when things stop working.
Many good answers. But I was wondering how you guys appeal to the Big Two (Google and Microsoft) if you end up in either their publicly known or secret spam lists? Especially the latter seems to be a problem despite having set up spf, dkim, dmarc correctly.
I'm also considering self-hosting email, but pretty much everything I've read suggests that keeping your emails out of spam folders is a huge pain. Still exploring different options.
Linode and hand the keys to Claude (in an appropriately limited way). It sets up dkim, dmarc, spf etc and will guide you through processing dmarc reports. Interestingly it's better than the previous (hand tuned over 15 years) setup in that even hotmail manages to receive email now.
postfix, dovecot, rspamd on debian stable, with lots of custom configuration. The main problem is not really the server side or getting it set up right, if you know what you're doing, but outbound delivery if you're sending SMTP traffic from any kind of bulk hosting/VPS/VM/colo provider. No matter how impeccable your spf, dkim, dmarc is.
I run the same, except on FreeBSD. I have my own ASN and an IPv4 /24 block with a good reputation dating back the 90's. Basically, it looks like a corporate network, not some random VPS, even though it's run out of a basement colo in the middle of suburbia.
My advice after doing it for 13+ years is - don't do it.
Finding a hosting provider that gives you a clean class C to run out of is almost impossible. Every VPS has tenants who spam, and every provider will be flagged in one way or another. You will spend a bunch of time trying to white-list/make your mail server behave to ensure delivery to the google/microsoft mail servers, and some systems will just ban your email anyways.
It got to the point where I would send an email to someone, and then follow up with a phone call because I was not confident mail would be delivered as expected.
I found a hosting provider dedicated to e-mail (Migadu actually), and switched everything over to that and haven't realistically had to worry about maintaining a mail server since
I have self hosted side 2001, mostly opensuse, with postfix, but the IMAP etc has changed over the years, now using dovecot. Yes its a pain, yes it takes effort, but just like some people spend there spare time painting, I run my own email server.
Mail-in-a-box (https://mailinabox.email) on Ubuntu Server which installs Postfix, Dovecot, nsd, NextCloud, RoundCube, nginx, spam assasin, postgrey ... and a good admin panel.
Mine runs on an Intel NUC at home, with the a sensible ISP who naturally can provide a fixed IP address (everything open), IPv6, and clean address.
Been very happy with it, both the software, and the independence :) A little IT and network knowledge is useful if you're doing more than the standard (VPS) install, but that's to be expected.
I've been self-hosting for almost 20 years.
However, my server went down many, many times for hours without me noticing, sometimes for days.
Despite today's outage, it's still more than worth having a third-party company like Google or Microsoft handle your email. At least they have monitoring 24/7 and people on call to fix issues when things stop working.
I've been running stalw.art in a Docker container for past couple of years and it has been a low-fuss affair, but I'm the only account.
Many good answers. But I was wondering how you guys appeal to the Big Two (Google and Microsoft) if you end up in either their publicly known or secret spam lists? Especially the latter seems to be a problem despite having set up spf, dkim, dmarc correctly.
That’s why self-hosting is not a decision to be made lightly.
And to be clear, if you are running a business you can be blocked by your customers’ infrastructure even if you are fine with the big boys.
And that can happen if you are not self hosting but not using one of the big providers.
Hetzner even has a straightforward guide to setting up a self-hosted mail server: https://community.hetzner.com/tutorials/setup-mailserver-wit...
I'm also considering self-hosting email, but pretty much everything I've read suggests that keeping your emails out of spam folders is a huge pain. Still exploring different options.
Same. It is not the server or hardware. It is where the email lands and what they do with your email based on the metadata.
Haven't tried it myself but https://stalw.art/ looks interesting
I'm curious about this too
Linode and hand the keys to Claude (in an appropriately limited way). It sets up dkim, dmarc, spf etc and will guide you through processing dmarc reports. Interestingly it's better than the previous (hand tuned over 15 years) setup in that even hotmail manages to receive email now.
I'm running https://stalw.art/ hooked into my SSO hosted on my k8s cluster
Some emails end up in spam some don't, quite frankly I just need it for system alerts for my self hosted services
Mailserver image on Hetzner
nixos-mailserver[0] + ZohoMail as an outbound relay.
Works like a charm!
[0]: https://gitlab.com/simple-nixos-mailserver/nixos-mailserver
Hetzner is not cheap anymore. They tripled their pricing.
postfix, dovecot, rspamd on debian stable, with lots of custom configuration. The main problem is not really the server side or getting it set up right, if you know what you're doing, but outbound delivery if you're sending SMTP traffic from any kind of bulk hosting/VPS/VM/colo provider. No matter how impeccable your spf, dkim, dmarc is.
I run the same, except on FreeBSD. I have my own ASN and an IPv4 /24 block with a good reputation dating back the 90's. Basically, it looks like a corporate network, not some random VPS, even though it's run out of a basement colo in the middle of suburbia.