This Microsoft outage being the last drop in the bucket, I’m looking to get my email/calendar/contacts somewhere under my control.
As I already self-host a number of things (e.g. my Linux ISO collection), and have services exposed to the internet, it would make sense to run it at home.
After all, it’s not heavy lifting. It’s not hosting 500+ mailboxes for 100+ people. It’s just little old me, with a handful of domains, catch-all receiving and a few dedicated sending addresses.
However email is a bit more mission critical than my smarthome control or self hosted LLMs. Downtime could be critically bad, and I still don’t trust my home setup to be truly 99.999999% available.
I don’t mind paying for a service but if I do I’d prefer something European, given I’m based in the UK (and otherwise am an EU citizen).
I’m really curious how y’all solve it. I guess I’m interested in some kind of hybrid solution where there’s my own server and a hosted service, latter which acts as a backup solution, but still fully synced, so if my internet or power goes out (or my server goes down), I can still get mail sent and delivered.
So I’m not only just interested in the stack you run for email but the entire infrastructure, especially if you’ve solved this sort of off-site fallback service.
Receiving email isn’t too bad. Get a domain, set up dovecot and postfix, maybe a web frontend if you care. They’re in basically every distribution’s repos. I’m sure there’s a mess of containers for it too, if that’s your thing. Just have to make sure your ISP doesn’t block port 25.
Sending email, however, is a different beast. You need to have a stable, clean, IP address. Then setup all the extra stuff on top (DKIM, SPF, etc.)
Your dynamic IP from your home ISP isn’t going to cut it. If you can get a static IP, it might work, otherwise you need a tunnel or to host everything in the cloud, somewhat defeating the point.
Once you have a stable IP, and have the proper DNS records/certs set up, you begin the battle of getting your IP allowlisted. If you’re lucky, the IP will be clean-ish and not flagged. If it’s flagged, you’re basically screwed and need to get another IP. Then you have to test sending email to all the big providers and contact the ones that don’t allow your messages through. It’s a long process. It’s possible, but tedious.
I ran my own mail server for three years. It was fun, but also a lot.
Than you for this detailed explanation! Been trying to wrap my head around all this and this made it much clearer.
Makes me think twice. I have a “static” IP from my ISP but I have no real guarantee that won’t change at any time AFAIK. Making sure each provider accepts it and troubleshooting that sounds like more then I’d want to take on for now. I think for me the key is to switch to a custom domain so I can change providers or decide to self host later without changing my address.
I do have static IP and no ports blocked, so that’s no trouble.
I am looking for something low maintenance though, something I don’t need to constantly pester beyond updates.
Containers are preferred, as I already run a pretty complex Docker stack.
But you seem to have completely missed the last paragraphs of my post.
Have you tested port 25 specifically?
I guess I must have! Sorry if I missed the mark, I just wanted to share my experiences.
No worries mate, most people seem to have skimmed over the important part 😅
I did test it, my ISP doesn’t block any ports.