All this new excitement with Lemmy and federation has got me thinking that maybe I should learn to run my own instance. What always comes up though is how email is the orginal federated technology.
I am looking at proxmox and see that is has a built in email server, so now I am wondering if it is time to role my own.
I stopped using gmail a long time ago, and right now I use ProtonMail, but I am super frustrated with the dumb limitation of only having a single account for the app. I get why they do it, and I am willing to pay, but it is pricey and I don’t know if that is my best option. I guess it is worth it since ProtonVPN is included. It looks like they are expanding their suite.
Is it worth it? Can I make it secure? Is it stupid to run it off a local computer on my home network?
It’s bad out there when it comes to hosting your own email server. This blog post shows somebody’s experience in detail, and it’s worth reading. https://cfenollosa.com/blog/after-self-hosting-my-email-for-twenty-three-years-i-have-thrown-in-the-towel-the-oligopoly-has-won.html
It’s all so sad.
That was a sobering read. We all feel victorious when we see big tech fail after they wronged their users, but fundamental technologies that actually run the world have already been lost, and may never be recoverable for egalitarian use.
Yes, I still run my own email server. It is not for the faint of heart, but once it’s configured and your IP reputation is clean, it’s mostly smooth sailing. I have not had any deliverability problems to date, initial setup/learning period notwithstanding.
If you’re not scared away yet, here are some specific challenges you’ll face:
- SMTP ports are typically blocked by many providers as a spam prevention measure. Hosting on a residential connection is often a complete non-starter and is becoming more difficult on business class connections as well (at least in the US, anyway).
- If you plan to host in a VPS, good luck getting a clean IPv4 address. Most are on one or more public blacklists and likely several company-specific ones (cough Microsoft cough). I spent about 2 weeks getting my new VPS’s IP reputation cleaned up before I migrated from the old VPS.
- Uptime: You need to have a reliable hosting solution with minimal power/server/network downtime.
- Learning Curve: Email is not just one technology; it’s several that work together. So in a very basic email server, you will have Postfix as your MTA, Dovecot as your MDA, some kind of spam detection and filtering (e.g. SpamAssassin), some kind of antivirus to scan messages/attachments (e.g. Clamd), message signing (DKIM), user administration/management, webmail, etc. You’ll need to get all of these configured and operating in harmony.
- Spam prevention standards: You’ll need to know how to work with DNS and create/manage all of the appropriate records on your domain (MX, SPF, DMARC, DKIM records, etc). All of these are pretty much required in 2023 in order for messages from your server to reach your recipient.
- Keeping your IP reputation clean: This is an ongoing challenge if you host for a lot of people. It can only take one or two compromised accounts to send a LOT of spam and land your IP/IP block on a blacklist.
- Keeping up with new standards: When I set my mail server up, DMARC and DKIM weren’t required by most recipient servers. Around 2016, I had to bolt on OpenDKIM to my email stack otherwise my messages ended up in the recipient’s spam folder. -Contingency Plan: One day you may just wake up and decide it’s too much to keep managing your own email server. I’m not there yet, but I’ve already got a plan in place to let a bigger player take over when the time comes.
Yep. I’ve hosted my own mail server since the early oughts. One additional hurdle I’d add to you list is rDNS. If you can’t get that set up, you’ll have a hard time reaching many mail servers. Besides port blocking, that’s one of the many reason it’s a non-starter on consumer ISP.
I actually started on a static ISDN line when rDNS wasn’t an issue for running a mail server. Moved to business class dsl, and Ameritech actually delegated rDNS to me for my /29. When I moved to Comcast business, they wouldn’t delegate the rDNS for the IPv4. They did create rDNS entries for me, and they did delegate the rDNS for the IPv6 block. Though the way they deal with the /56 IPv6 block means only the first /64 is useable for rDNS.
But, everything you list has been things I’ve needed to deal with over the years.
Yeah, I totally forgot about reverse DNS. Good catch. I probably left out a few other things what with the repressed trauma of it all. lol.
I had to deal with Suddenlink business, and they were (somehow) surprisingly worse than what you described for Comcast (I didn’t know that was possible, TBH). Suddenlink wouldn’t even unblock the SMTP ports at all let alone delegate rDNS to our static.
Wow. I am emotionally ready for the challenge, but not intellectually, and maybe not even financially.
IP reputation is such a new concept to me, but I have already come across it when the IP from the VPN I am using is blacklisted. Super annoying. I really have to reconsider my threat level because I am starting to get the feeling that I do not need it. I am a good boy and don’t pirate much, mostly books. And for the naughty stuff… well I didn’t feel unsafe before I started a VPN.
Well, you have given me a lot to think about. Thanks!
Well, running your own email server is definitely inexpensive. You’re probably fine financially :)
Looking at the pricing for all the recommendations I got, it really is cheap. Like, a tiny fraction compared to what I spend on a single yearly subscription to anything.
Obligatory PSA: ProtonMail isn’t any more secure than Gmail and is likely a honeypot scheme crafted by government agencies: https://encryp.ch/blog/disturbing-facts-about-protonmail/
I know the title of that sounds clickbaity, but they cite their sources. It’s worth the read for those curious about ProtonMail’s history and their CEOs.
Tbh, that document reads like a discovery channel 2am aliens documentary, but it’s not completely without merit.
There are a couple line items about software services they’re using that are shitty that sound pretty legit. The fact that they’re operating in locations where they might have to hand over data sounds pretty legit. Their warrant compliance and logging/handing over a person’s IP address is legit.
The CIA honeypot stuff is all really circumstantial. If the CIA was in as deep as is claimed, a lot of the real evidence people are turning up that they’re not a secure as they could be would be unnecessary.
My best guess is they decided to make an email company based in Switzerland with the schtick that they’re secure (banks amirite?) They’re doing what they can to appear secure without spending too much money. They’re not going to have legal battles to keep your data private, and they are going to comply with agencies request for data. Even if they support end-to-end encryption if they are required by an agency to turn that encryption off for you, they’re going to do it.
They’re probably less likely than Google or Microsoft to sell all of your data to the highest bidder, but realistically there’s no such thing as secure email.
The basic assumption every privacy-concerned person should have about email is that it’s never secure. Unless you use an offline cryptography program to encrypt your email text and then paste it into the email body before you send it, your emails are insecure.
Email was never designed with that in mind. If you want to communicate securely with somebody, use a medium/method that has been designed from the start for that purpose.
I use ProtonMail because it’s not a massive corpo and it’s open source, but I don’t believe that my emails are significantly more secure than on a service like Exchange or Gmail.
This has been my thinking about ProtonMail, even after reading the article on here, and even after reading https://digdeeper.club/articles/email.xhtml (which I have to reread because it keeps getting bigger).
There is no perfect solution, just different levels of trust. That is right, if I want to be “secure” I got to act like a journalist and use a temporary solution or something that has end-to-end encryption.
Besides, email is meant for public communication. No reason to elevate it into some something it will never be.
Yeah. In my experience, you have to be careful in the world of tech privacy/FOSS to not fall off a cliff to the extremes.
You can always find reasons to not trust some piece of tech hardware or software. It’s all too complex and multifaceted to fully vett, and even when you can do that, there isn’t anything that isn’t touched in some way by mega-corps or glowie agencies.
Tor was developed by the US gov, same with the ancestor of the internet. Your network traffic runs on mega-corp wires, through mega-corp servers. Your hardware is developed, built, and distributed by mega-corps, as is most the firmware and microcode in them.
Even Richard Stallman, one of the most hardcore Free Software advocates has concessions he makes for firmware, microcode, and so forth.
The only way to be truly and completely secure tech-wise is to pull a Ted K. And go run into the woods and live in a little cabin, disown any tech built after the turn of the century lol.
It’s “all or something” not, “all or nothing.” Determine your threat model, your ethical bounds, and let those principles guide you. I think fundamentally what all FOSS folks have in common is the idea that the tech you use should serve your needs and desires, not the needs/desires of billion dollar mega-corps farming you as a product.
This is the most sane perspective I have read. For sure it is important to have solid principles and do the right things whenever possible, but no one gets to demand changes for something they never contributed to, especially not those things that took a massive amount of money and human power to build. We are all standing on the soldiers of giants, and it is insane to think we can be Ratatouille, controlling them for out benefit.
The only way to change governments and mega-corps is to make it unprofitable when they do the things we don’t like, or make it so doing the right thing makes them lots of money.
Thanks for this, it is the reality check I need to make good decisions. Even if I do become the Unidumbass, the people I love who would never follow me into that lifestyle.
I actually have a formal methodology for how I engage with software/hardware from a FOSS perspective:
Embrace, Subvert, Accept.
For any task I do currently or want to do, I apply this process:
I first try to find and use any FOSS software/hardware that does that thing well enough to use entirely. (Embrace)
If there isn’t a FOSS solution that exists or does essential things I need, then I use a proprietary technology in a subversive way to do it. So cracked copies, jail broken or otherwise hacked hardware, or using the proprietary service through an unofficial/unapproved 3rd party app. (Subvert)
If I can’t do that either, but the task/need is absolutely critical, only then do I accept using proprietary and unmodified software/hardware. (Accept)
This method has worked pretty great for me. Now about 3 years after starting my FOSS journey, I have almost no software/hardware I use that is in that third category. Basically everything I use is FOSS, hacked, cracked, modded, or runs on platforms that are, and I enjoy tech and computing more than I ever have :)
This is a good method. It is our duty to do everything we can to live by our principles, and be careful about the compromises we make. The more I go deep into FOSS, the more I discover. So much exists, it just takes some work on our part to fit it to our needs. Programming competency does not have to be high, just enough to fix any compile errors.
What’s the saying? If you can’t tell if it’s ignorance or malice, it’s probably the former?
however, with all of these points, even if it is ignorance, the lying about encryption (even though I don’t really use it) is upsetting. That plus the other lies I’ve seen them pull is enough to make me consider switching to something else.
Got any recs? Lol
Fascinating read. I have a lot to research. It is not like ProtonMail is the only alternative provider… there are so many, I just like all the extras that they are attaching to it.
I’ve been self-hosting e-mail for over 15 years and hope to continue doing so. Although it’s being made increasingly difficult by big tech players. I wrote about it here: https://proycon.anaproy.nl/posts/rant-against-centralising-e-mail/
Great post!
I’m a rather dismayed to see those universities and institutes nowadays no longer as pioneers and innovators in this area, but instead as mere consumers of ready-made corporate solutions, following corporate interests and centralising solutions. I have two employers, both academic, and both have resorted to big-tech corporations that offer solutions like e-mail as a service.
Same here, my university recently switched from their Horde webmail to Exchange. The new outlook webmail is absolutely awful and I couldn’t set up all the filters that I had before. Luckily I could enable IMAP login, thankfully without OAuth because imo that’s another awful practice, so I can connect to it with non braindead mail clients. Still a massive downgrade and I bet they now have to run it on a 10x as powerful server because I hear Exchange is an absolute monster in terms of resource usage.
(Also, I’ve been self-hosting mail for probably 4 years at this point. Here’s to many more!)
Aren’t you afraid about some important email getting discarded without you knowing about it? Or about unnoticed downtime which results in missed mails?
When I am sending? Well, once things are set up properly I’m pretty confident that things arrive (though nobody can ever be 100% sure of course). I also tend to mail to the same recipient domains a lot, like for work and hobby projects, so once those are tested you get pretty confident.
Unnoticed downtime is usually quickly noticed, I depend on my server for a lot of things. Senders are often resilient enough to keep things in their queue and try a few times. There’s also a fallback MX registry at my (3rd party) DNS host which will queue stuff in case the primary MX goes down.
I like what you write, I am going to look deeper into it. It really sucks that the nearly utopian promises of the future and newfound freedoms have been progressively squashed. Every ‘disruption’ that looked like a return to that utopia has ultimately been evil and firmly entrenched in the capitalist mindset.
I am glad it is still possible. I think it would be healthy for me and everyone else to practice digital homesteading, to become self-sufficient while still being able to lean on the greater community of like minded people.
Not worth the hassle - best compromise is to get your own domain but use a provider like fastmail to host it.
If they turn sour you can move your domain to another mail host.
I think this is the solution I was thinking about in the first place. I was just musing about it being part of a home lab. I have to consider whether this solution is is better than just paying for secure email.
There are advantages to having your own domain - you can use something like vendor8832@yourdomain.com so each site you sign up to gets their own unique “to” address, that way you can easily send their mail to trash when you dont’ need to deal with them anymore, and will also let you know what company had a data breach if that unique email address starts to get spam.
This is what I want! I want that granular control of having an email address compartmentalized for specific kinds of communication. I mean, I know it is something provided by basically all email providers, but I don’t know, for sure there are limitations. A unique address for each website seems like such a smart thing to do, on top of being stingy with giving out my email address.
Protonmail at certain levels gives you simple login with unlimited aliases. Something to look into. I love it and have been with them for years.
Thank you! I was also looking for validation that Protonmail is worth the purchase, since I use them anyways.
Firefox Relay is by far the easiest (and imo best) solution for that
You can try it for free and if you use it enough it only costs $24 a year
Neato. Yeah, just today I spent more than that on a haircut. Will deeply consider it.
Your first 5 email masks are free and if you install the extension a little icon will appear in most email fields. Let’s you create a new mask right there.
If you buy the premium version you can get your own custom subdomain: @XXXX.mozmail.com where you pick XXXX
This way you don’t even need the extension. You can just do something like “Lemmy@XXXX.mozmail.com” and Relay will “create” that email for you. Cannot recommend it enough, especially since it’s free to start
That actually seems really awesome, like it defeats the reason I would ever want to create multiple email accounts, which is to manage different contexts like professional, personal for family and friends, commercial email for online stores, and email lists.
Can’t recommend this enough: https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver
This is has been recommended probably the most. Coming on top as a winner.
I run my own fork where I added MySQL support for aliases. But otherwise it’s great.
Nice! Seems like a cool solution for aliases.
Running a mail server these days is not that difficult. While using pre-assembled stacks like mailcow only the DNS entries needs to be done. If you want to run it at home you should do some research on routing all the traffic through a wireguard tunnel to preserve a public IP other mail instances will accept
Despite my willingness to self-host almost everything, e-mail remains the last frontier for me. Keeping abreast of standards, keeping up today, avoiding implications in abuse and many, many smaller issues abound … and that’s despite my fixed IP and ISP willing to set up a reverse-DNS for me.
Instead I’ve gone with a paid email provider that I’m REALLY happy with.
For sure, if I am asking this question, there must already exist a reasonble solution.
I stopped running my own a while ago. Its no longer really decentralized and the big players (google/microsoft) will often just blacklist you for little reason.
That said I DO maintain my own domain and backups. So i can take my email to whatever hosting provider I want.
I also noticed, during the migration, that if you simply register your domain with one of the big players (ie: Google Workspace or M365) you will often get whitelisted and email will flow easier. This was easier when they had a free tier though.
Got the same issue. Everything was setup properly. SPF, dkim, dmarc was all good. Server IP wasn’t in any blocklists. But my messages would still fall in spam with Gmail.
Ended up setting sendgrid as a relay and all is good now.
I guess you got to play the game if you want to win. I Google and Microsoft have the same level of trust from me, so it goes to whoever makes it easier.
Pretty much. Its kinda nuts. I just host with Google at this point. Its easier though privacy is a disaster. I consider email to be public at this point though after the Snowden stuff. Have considered moving to something like Photon but their lack of support for contact syncing makes it tough, specifically for my wife. She uses Apple Mail as well, which i THINK photon can now support via IMAP or something, but not having contacts synced is hard.
That said I back up all of my Google workspace stuff, email included, to a local synology using their app. So i have copies of everything should I need it (ie: google decides to suspend me for no reason.)
Damn. Privacy is something I was hoping would be a benefit from self-hosting.
I mean, I haven’t taken the bite yet but it is way more than I can chew. I am not keen on basic stuff like encryption.
Hell, I just want to have both my email accounts on my phone without paying for it. I think privacy is worth paying for, but I need to be smart about what I trust.
Here’s the catch with email via privacy. Unless you are gpg encrypting the email even photon doesn’t matter, as whoever you are sending to likely has it unencrypted at rest on their server.
And while tls in transit is better than it used to be with their smpts or starttls, plenty of mail servers don’t do it. So even transport is an iffy game sometimes.
At the end of the day, it’s better to
A. GPG encrypt the email. Which requires both ends to be technically competent. B. Consider it to be quasi public, like talking quietly in a coffee shop. Most won’t hear it but if someone does shrug
Right. One of the articles someone linked basically explained this limitation. So, privacy is kind of an illusion, or a half-true marketing gimmick.
No. But I did consider it. Multiple times.
Why not? I’m too scared! Email is the one service that let’s an attacker nuke each and everything. It’s still the most central/crucial service that almost any service relies on. If I lose access to my mail account, I lose access to pretty much every service.
As much as I would like to host this myself, I simply do not feel comfortable to do it.
Pretty much for this reason for me as well.
I’m a tech hobbyist and I’ve run/currently run things like Nextcloud, Jitsi, Matrix, XMPP, etc. But all that seems pretty small-scale. However with e-mail, nearly everything relies on it, and from the headaches I’ve heard about from those who self-host e-mail, it just seems like a perfect way to screw yourself over 😅
AAAHHH!. Now I am scared too.
So much to consider it is dizzying.
I originally did but the maintenance burden was killing me. Then last year Proton unified their subscription with VPN and Mail (also upgrading my Proton VPN only subscription to Proton plus) and from there I decided to just go all in on Proton mail. I integrated my domain to Proton mail and never looked back.
Same. One day I realized that emails where toi important for beeing host by an amateur me. 😉
It seems like the most sane solution. It is not that expensive for the basic tier given my needs and how important email is for daily functioning. Plus, the perks are pretty damn awesome. I have been paying for mullvad, who are solid, but the more I learn about VPNs, the more it feels like warm blanket than real armor, at least for how I use it.
ProtonMail does have some sketchy history that someone pointed out, but I also think that it is really hard to set up a service that offers every feature and not make a concession somewhere.
Well the use case for VPN for me is more into traffic routing than staying secure. Sometimes I experience slow downloads but when I connect to the right VPN endpoint, it speeds up / regain back the download speed. The only reason why I picked ProtonVPN of all places is because it was (and still is) one of the VPN services that was isn’t bought over by a tech conglomerate that buy and stacks up VPN services (https://embed.kumu.io/9ced55e897e74fd807be51990b26b415#vpn-company-relationships/protonvpn)
As for ProtonMail being sketchy and honeypot is as old fear mongering as time itself. If you are sketchy about how ProtonMail works, just remember that ProtonMail requires a bridge client for external clients like Outlook and Thunderbird because of its e2ee nature (therefore not compatible with traditional email clients). The bridge client code is open for you to see as well (https://github.com/ProtonMail/proton-bridge) and you can even compile it yourself if you want to.
Interesting. I had read some of those accusations before, but all the time I was thinking they ain’t google or microsoft, they can’t just give away user data and get paid for it. They need to be clean (enough) to have the growth they did without pissing off most of their users.
The explanation for only being able to use their own client makes sense. I don’t see how they can make attempts at privacy while using established tech that does not care about privacy.
I’ve been hosting my own mail server, ever since I got into Linux. Most companies where I worked before, used self hosted email.
I’ve since migrated to using mailcow, which takes a lot of the headache out of it.
When you first start, it’s a bit daunting. But easily manageble, once you’ve gained some experience.
I think that is it, I am just so unfamiliar with email and networking in general, it seems way harder than it probably is.
I thought I would be getting a lot of different solutions, but there are only a few everyone seems to employ, mailcow being at or near the top.
Mailcow definitely makes it very easy. Their official docs pretty much walk you through every step and tell you which DNS entries you need.
Bonus with mailcow is, that you basically get a self-hosted equivalent of an Exchange server. So, contacts+calender and so on. Plus some really good antispam features.
It does seem to a lot. I tried setting up DNS for my tailscale account, but I got confused. I am glad when the documentation is good, means I will actually use the thing successfully.
I did for a couple years, but moved to mailbox.org a while ago. The effort was much to high to save a few bucks and there is no real upside to it. E-Mail is a troublesome mixture of different protocols from the internet stone age held together by chewing gum (SMTP, POP3, IMAP, DNS, database or file storage, maybe ActiveSync, Web-Mailer, …)
Even when everything is up and running there is always maintenance to keep your SSL certificates up to date, update your incoming spam filter technique, keep other mail providers assured that you are not spamming (DKIM, etc.), keep all the different system services (see above) up to date and interoperable, etc. and every few years when you want to move to a new server, provider or Linux distro you start it all over again.
Damn, it is so bizarre that email of all things would be the least operable by tech savvy individuals. Someone linked an article that explains it, and it truly is depressing. Like, it makes me not want to even have email… which is not really possible if I want to be employed. Eh, it’s not like I DON’T already have free email accounts, I just don’t always like the decision my provider makes.
Well, there are plenty of providers out there there should be one that suits you. Having a domain of your own with DNS access and letting the provider doing the hosting is not (so) hard and gives you the flexibility to switch any time.
That is cool. Everytime I have created a new email account, it has been an island. Never learned to preserve emails… Well, except the one time I use Thunderbird. I should set that up again. Maybe it would solve my issue of multiple accounts??
In any case I like consolidation and I don’t like logging into a website everytime if I can avoid it.
I used to run my own mail server about 2 years ago but unfortunately the spam got so bad I didn’t have the time to manage all the filters. I moved over to ProtonMail since I can still use my own domain there. So I guess I would say it’s not really worth it also it really sucks if your power is out and not having access to sent your power company a strongly worded email.
Good point, I don’t want to be foolish and make using email worse for me. My area has gotten blackouts, so that can be a problem.
Okay, it is seems that ProtonMail is winning out.
Anyways, I there are so many other cool programs to self-host, so once I get good with those I can tackle email if I think it is still worth trying.
I do host my own mailserver for multiple years now without any issues.
I’m using https://docker-mailserver.github.io/docker-mailserver/latest/ on a rented server, not at home. I recently added DKIM and I check my setup via https://mxtoolbox.com and the like in irregular intervals to see if I can improve something.
The only downside I see is spam filtering, which obviously works better with GMail if the whole world population does the filtering for you. But the included SpamAssassin setup does work and catches most of the spam. I do check for false positives/negatives very regularly and have training folders set up so I can easily move messages into the SA training.
Spam is something I am super worried about. Like, I know I can’t even be careful and audit every person or company I give my email to. It will inevitably end up on a list and make life hell.
On the whole I have learned to be careful, and I would be very selfish, just set up email for myself. My mother is way to happy to sign up for every goddamn thing. She can keep her Gmail, not like it would benefit her or friends if she migrates.
opensmtpd+rspamd works perfectly for spam. been running this for years now and I never get spam
Love that there is a simple solution for spam. Thank you for the tip!
happy to help if you need help configuring opensmtpd/dovecot/rspamd (rspamd also handles DKIM for you)
Thank you for the offer!
