Does anyone have success stories about self-hosting email, or is it all futile and I should just use a paid service like Fastmail? From what I've found online, self-hosting guarantees that I'll get on someone's spam list, and removing myself from it will require a ton of effort (if it's possible at all).
@L29Ah "Did", so you don't do it anymore? Why? Also, how long did you keep it up, and what did you replace it with?
@minoru Used to host it on my home box, but i don't have a home with a box anymore, so i'm just using riseup.net for personal mail.
@L29Ah @minoru Same here. With a proper security configuration I had no issues over recent years with my personal email.
I use some cheap 128MiB Ram vps box. Nothing fancy.
I think that’s because when everything is properly signed from DNS to IPs then probability that our emails are fishy is negligible.
@minoru It's not overly difficult. If you are just doing personal email then you likely won't end up on a spam list. The issue is that with email you don't know there's a problem until people haven't been getting your email (or you haven't gotten any) for like a year and you finally notice. It's not that it's hard, it's that problems are quiet.
Even as someone who knows how to self-host email (I worked for an ESP for a while), I'd still just use a paid service so I don't have to deal with it.
@minoru I've been selfhosting my email for the past 15 years, and I can tell it is way easier now :)
Still require work and maintenance though. Sometimes also some action to get remove from blacklist, but that happened only 2 times for me…
There are already a lot of packaged things for people starting email hosting like mailcow, yunohost and others :)
Sometimes also some action to get remove from blacklist, but that happened only 2 times for me…
That's the part that scares me the most. I don't want to suddenly find out that my emails stopped getting delivered a few weeks ago.
2 times in 15 years doesn't sound so bad though, I could live with that.
@minoru Well, it happened this year (the 2nd time) and basically took me 30min to fix (but only 2 days after so that may be a problem)…
But yeah, when I found out it was not something I wished happen for sure.
I won't say it's worth it or not because it really depends on you at the end…
Also, having other users like family makes it a bit more painful as they just expect stuff to always work^^
@minoru i did, was pretty straightforward with postfix and dkim/stuff howtos