Common folklore is that this is extremely onerous to self-host (and have it work successfully.) How did you go about it?

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ziml77 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Also, how do you mask your identity if you self-host? I can have as many mailboxes as I want but they're all trivial to correlate because they share a domain that isn't providing email accounts to large amounts of users. And then there's the matter of a VPS not actually being under my control. It's a VM running in a datacenter. I could run the mail server locally, but then I'd still need to relay through a VPS to mask my IP address. And that's still only protecting from a casual adversary...

	▲	drnick1 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		What do you mean by "masking your identity"? If you self-host at home, then your IP will be discoverable through DNS, but no one but the ISP will know who the account holder is. Registering a domain also normally requires providing a name and address, but no ID is normally required and it is an open secret that a large proportion of WHOIS information is fake.

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drnick1 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The common folklore is just FUD. The main issue is deliverability to the likes of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc. You need a clean fixed IP in non-residential block and a sufficiently aged domain or your mail will be flagged as spam or rejected. Alternatively, you can use a relay service for outbound email. Besides the deliverability issue, hosting email is fairly trivial from a technical standpoint; on Linux, the standard utilities are Postfix, Dovecot and OpenDKIM. The server is for my own use, so I don't even bother with spam and AV filters.

Even if you can't send email at all (unlikely if you use an outbound relay), there are very significant privacy benefits to having your own server. I send very few emails relative to the number I receive. You couldn't pay me enough to go back to one of big commercial providers.

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bigiain 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> You need a clean fixed IP in non-residential block

Feels like that's carrying a lot of load there?

Where do you get those? I doubt any inexpensive VPS provider has any clean IP addresses? AWS charge you $5/month for an elastic IP address, and I bet you'd need to cycle through their pool of those looking for one that hasn't been blacklisted recently?

There's another thing to consider here too. I was selfhosting my own mail, but back in 2013/14 I investigated all my mail, and even though I'd avoided Google/Microsoft,Yahoo et al. - over 80% of my personal email was on their servers because that's where my correspondents were. I pretty much gave up maintaining my own (slightly over complicated) stuff and gave in and chose to accept the "Do no evil" company at face value. 4 or 5 years later that company no longer existed, even though they continue with the same name today.

	▲	drnick1 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I get my IP through work, but another way of obtaining one would be subscribing to a business account with a regular ISP. Normally, this also allows you to set a reverse DNS. You will likely have to pay more for your Internet, but considering that you won't have to pay for any cloud service anymore, you will probably still come out ahead and gain a huge amount of sovereignty over your computing. A VPS could be an option, but many (cheap ones) may have tainted IPs or outright filter the SMTP port.

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crossroadsguy 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

If I may say so, did you not just show in this very comment that that common folklore about self-hosting email "successfully" is not really FUD? :D