Are there any nostriches hosting their own email server? If so, how is the experience? Is it worth it? #asknostr
Discussion
I followed Luke smith's speed run youtube. Have two servers both in Iceland. Work great.
Seems easy enough. Is it easy enough to maintain? My fear is that it will require a lof of maintenance with spam, etc.
nostr:npub1l0uneskvz7l53vx766vcyk2l9me47r4fcc5yfdzzzd6m43sw76yq4prhn4 used to, something like a year ago, but has stopped since. So not worth it for him.
Mailcow is pretty cool, it's a dockerized stack for running a mail server (with rspamd, webui, etc). Pretty easy to setup and configure. What u was struggling the most with was the spam configuration. A lot of inbound mails were going to spam. Also, big mail providers tend to blacklist mail servers ran by individuals on vps, etc. Check this article out https://blog.lopp.net/death-of-decentralized-email/.
Yes. I use yunohost, had to get a static ip otherwise my emails would be marked as spam. Not using it for all my emails, I use mostly for services like Uber etc, I create an email for each service. So far I'm happy, once setup didn't had any problems. Email providers can always increase the prices or just terminate the service, so I went with my own server.
Yeah, I just want to be more self sovereign and hosting my own email server seems like a smart thing to do. That said, I really don't want a maintenance hell. And also, there's this guys hopeless post about hosting his own email
Yeah I didnt go through any of that, I didn't have to setup the whole thing from scratch, yunohost already comes with the email stack ready to use, i just configured it with my personal domain etc. The most important thing for me was getting the static ip. After that i just have it running, no maintenance whatsoever. You can try it on a VM, I run it on a VM. You don't need a static ip right away, most of the times your ip will be the same, it's good enough to try it. Check internetcu.be I was going to buy one of the cubes but I already had a Yunohost server, so I just got the VPN to get a static ip for the email in yunohost.
Wrote an Ansible role for this. Have a 10/10 score on mail-tester for outbound but I mostly use it for creating an alias everytime I register somewhere. If a site is sending me annoying emails i can prune their alias, and then it's like having a layer 7 firewall that tells them off with a bounce.
Still send family mail via Proton.
Tbh, that's what I want the mail server for right now. I was thinking that I could use it for aliases and signups now and maybe, if I see that it works and isn't too hard to maintain, I can eventually move over to mainly use it as my main email server. I don't know much about Ansible tbh, is that script open sourced anywhere?
If you are mostly looking for email aliases, then AnonAddy could be interesting for you as it can be also self hosted: https://addy.io/self-hosting/
I have once done that in the past, but since my setup is not fully completed and secured (DKIM, etc) my vps IP got blacklisted for quite a long time (hard to unblock) becuse there are lots of email bots 'pretend' to come and send spam from my server. Have to done it perfectly otherwise many problems will be occured 😅
I have no idea why anyone would want to do that.
As long as you're using a custom domain you can just pick it up like a hermit crab and move from provider to provider as they become hostile or more expensive. Market forces and economy of scale Will always make it cheaper to use a service as opposed to rolling your own.
Any privacy benefits erode when your counterparty uses a different service. And we have PGP for this.