It is not that hard to run your own email server, what is hard is to get your mail into recipients mailboxes. The big players in this market have basically decided to block (at random) all mail that doesn't come out of a known email service.
I have just given up running my own mail server after more than 15 years because of this problem. Five years ago I had no problems, but these last 12 months have made me decide to give up and just pay.
It's true it is harder; definitely much harder if you're not a sysadmin by trade. These days to get mail to deliver you not only need to support SMTP, but also TLS, SPF, DKIM, DMARC at a minimum. You also need to make sure that you aren't inadvertently a source for relaying, or non delivery report (NDR) / delivery status notification (DSN) bounce source (vis a vis spam with faked return paths etc).
In short if you don't / won't / can't do the above you are indeed much better paying someone else to do it (preferably at scale with attention to detail like fastmail).
I used to do all these things (not that I am a sysadmin by trade, but after 15 years you get to know the job). Even doing all this the big email players (Microsoft in particular, but Yahoo and Google are also guilty) will just ditch your emails without rhyme or reason if it is not coming out of a known email service.
This didn’t used to happen, but it looks like they have now outsourced their spam filtering to the email service providers who now act as the gatekeepers to email ecosystem - email from a known service == good, email from business that has been around for more than a decade == spam.
I have just given up running my own mail server after more than 15 years because of this problem. Five years ago I had no problems, but these last 12 months have made me decide to give up and just pay.
I'm tempted to do so as well, but I haven't found a provider that will just use my domain and let me set up aliases as I can now in postfix. (Wildcard on the domain to me, a handful split out to separate mailboxes for scripts to chew on, etc)
I configured a pretty simple system (dovecot + opensmtpd) following the guide on the Arch wiki in under an hour, it really wasn't that tricky. I have dodged some common problems, though:
- my domain wasn't completely unknown so I had no issues with gmail flagging me as spam
- I use my gmail for signing up to things I don't care about mail from, so I have yet to actually receive any spam (at which point I will figure out how spamassassin works)
I don't think we need any additional software to make the process easier, maybe just better documentation from the distributions themselves or some already set up bundles. Hosting providers like DigitalOcean already have ready-to-deploy images for WordPress and Docker and whatnot, why not one for mail?
Running a mail server is easy, providing a mail service is HARD. Deliverability is really difficult. Being online all the time to make sure you're always recieving email is hard.
I was constantly plagued by worry that the important email I sent never actually arrived, or the important email I was waiting for had been sent but I never actually got it.
Just because it's in the RFC does not mean it will be obeyed.
I tried running postgrey - a system that rejects senders it doesn't recognise, tells them to "try again in a minute", and accepts the second email. The theory being that spammers rarely check for these responses because they operate on a "fire and forget" basis. In reality it didn't work because lots of email services didn't correctly respond to the "try again in a minute" response - which is in the RFC!
Maybe it's an extreme example. You expect an SMTP server not to be up all the time, you don't expect them to randomly reject mail and ask you to try again later, but you get my point. It just adds to the stress/worry. I found myself default to Gmail a lot of the time for this reason.
I don't know if it still exists, but I'm sure it could be found or would make a good service. I seem to recall paying about $10/mo to a company that would provide secondary MX services. They did no delivery/webmail etc, it was purely "You can list us as a secondary MX and when yours is online we'll forward".
* Mail you want to receive:
Your server can be down for a few days (if I remember correctly, 5 days, according to postfix defaults) and still receive all emails when it goes up again. More downtime and the senders will receive permanent error bounces.
If you fear longer server downtimes, you also have the option of secondary MX servers.
* Mail you send:
Just display the mail log (/var/log/mail.info) and see if you get 250 OK responses when you submit messages. What happens next is not your responsibility anymore (except for spam filter rules of course, you need spf, dkim...)
I configured my server once, over two years ago. I logged in on root once again, when I run out of disk space, I made a cron job to remove oldest logs monthly. It's centos6 and it works. Should I care more about it? Anything I should pay attention to?
It's not that bad: "apt-get install mail-stack-delivery" on Ubuntu and you have everything you need. Ok, to make it real nice will take some work, to get approved certificates, SPF and DKIM working can be a challenge. But in general you can quickly get going of you want.
My main email system for me and my wife is an Ubuntu 14.04 DO droplet where I used said command to get going. I use ownCloud for card/caldav and ownCloud mail (and sometimes roundcube), my wife uses OsX mail. We both use Android mail clients. There is pain sometimes, when Outlook.com makes my mails vanish and admittedly I have yet to receive spam and have no system in place. This guide helped me a lot [0] there is way to much detail and a lot I didn't use but you'll learn a lot.
For more than I year now all I ever did as maintenance was apt-get update/upgrade.
I'll back up the downvoted parent comments claim that it's "not that bad". It's caused me a handful of stressful days over the last ten years. I don't have problems with deliverability since I implemented DKIM (as far as I know anyway).
I only occasionally had problems with outlook.com, I contacted them, their spam system is an outsourced blackbox. They advised me not to send mass emails... Which I don't of course. Gmail and Apple never gave me any problems. Yahoo banned me after my first mail, no idea why but it seems to work now. I feel like I'm fighting the good fight (decentralize all the things!) so I'll just accept the shortcomings, which are in general, not that many. There are even some nice things like I can have mail addresses that go to both me and my wife, unlimited spam addresses etc.
I'm running my mail server and it's not that hard IMO. There are a lot of guides, standards are easy to understand. I can't say how much one would devote to setup his server, probably few hours should be enough.
Gmail marks my mail as spam, for new recipients, though. I don't care, every gmail user usually checks his spam anyway and when I do care, I'll call person to ensure he got my mail, regardless whether I use gmail or my server.
Comments
It's really hard to run you own mail server. Much harder than a web server. This is bad for freedom on the internet.
http://www.ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2015/09/15/email.html
It is not that hard to run your own email server, what is hard is to get your mail into recipients mailboxes. The big players in this market have basically decided to block (at random) all mail that doesn't come out of a known email service.
I have just given up running my own mail server after more than 15 years because of this problem. Five years ago I had no problems, but these last 12 months have made me decide to give up and just pay.
It's true it is harder; definitely much harder if you're not a sysadmin by trade. These days to get mail to deliver you not only need to support SMTP, but also TLS, SPF, DKIM, DMARC at a minimum. You also need to make sure that you aren't inadvertently a source for relaying, or non delivery report (NDR) / delivery status notification (DSN) bounce source (vis a vis spam with faked return paths etc).
In short if you don't / won't / can't do the above you are indeed much better paying someone else to do it (preferably at scale with attention to detail like fastmail).
I used to do all these things (not that I am a sysadmin by trade, but after 15 years you get to know the job). Even doing all this the big email players (Microsoft in particular, but Yahoo and Google are also guilty) will just ditch your emails without rhyme or reason if it is not coming out of a known email service.
This didn’t used to happen, but it looks like they have now outsourced their spam filtering to the email service providers who now act as the gatekeepers to email ecosystem - email from a known service == good, email from business that has been around for more than a decade == spam.
The irony is that nowadays most spam I get is from @gmail or @yahoo addresses, so all they've accomplished is lock-in.
I have been running my own email with nothing but a real certificate (maybe that matters) and SPF with no (delivery) issues.
I'm tempted to do so as well, but I haven't found a provider that will just use my domain and let me set up aliases as I can now in postfix. (Wildcard on the domain to me, a handful split out to separate mailboxes for scripts to chew on, etc)
I configured a pretty simple system (dovecot + opensmtpd) following the guide on the Arch wiki in under an hour, it really wasn't that tricky. I have dodged some common problems, though:
- my domain wasn't completely unknown so I had no issues with gmail flagging me as spam
- I use my gmail for signing up to things I don't care about mail from, so I have yet to actually receive any spam (at which point I will figure out how spamassassin works)
I don't think we need any additional software to make the process easier, maybe just better documentation from the distributions themselves or some already set up bundles. Hosting providers like DigitalOcean already have ready-to-deploy images for WordPress and Docker and whatnot, why not one for mail?
Running a mail server is easy, providing a mail service is HARD. Deliverability is really difficult. Being online all the time to make sure you're always recieving email is hard.
I was constantly plagued by worry that the important email I sent never actually arrived, or the important email I was waiting for had been sent but I never actually got it.
SMTP requires the sender to retry delivery if the destination is unreachable.
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5321#section-4.5.4.1
Just because it's in the RFC does not mean it will be obeyed.
I tried running postgrey - a system that rejects senders it doesn't recognise, tells them to "try again in a minute", and accepts the second email. The theory being that spammers rarely check for these responses because they operate on a "fire and forget" basis. In reality it didn't work because lots of email services didn't correctly respond to the "try again in a minute" response - which is in the RFC!
Maybe it's an extreme example. You expect an SMTP server not to be up all the time, you don't expect them to randomly reject mail and ask you to try again later, but you get my point. It just adds to the stress/worry. I found myself default to Gmail a lot of the time for this reason.
I don't know if it still exists, but I'm sure it could be found or would make a good service. I seem to recall paying about $10/mo to a company that would provide secondary MX services. They did no delivery/webmail etc, it was purely "You can list us as a secondary MX and when yours is online we'll forward".
* Mail you want to receive: Your server can be down for a few days (if I remember correctly, 5 days, according to postfix defaults) and still receive all emails when it goes up again. More downtime and the senders will receive permanent error bounces.
If you fear longer server downtimes, you also have the option of secondary MX servers.
* Mail you send: Just display the mail log (/var/log/mail.info) and see if you get 250 OK responses when you submit messages. What happens next is not your responsibility anymore (except for spam filter rules of course, you need spf, dkim...)
Great, now I've got to run TWO mail servers. That'll decrease my anxiety levels. ;D
I configured my server once, over two years ago. I logged in on root once again, when I run out of disk space, I made a cron job to remove oldest logs monthly. It's centos6 and it works. Should I care more about it? Anything I should pay attention to?
It's not that bad: "apt-get install mail-stack-delivery" on Ubuntu and you have everything you need. Ok, to make it real nice will take some work, to get approved certificates, SPF and DKIM working can be a challenge. But in general you can quickly get going of you want.
Have you ever run your own mail server before?
edit: I've never spoken to someone who has and says it is 'easy'.
My main email system for me and my wife is an Ubuntu 14.04 DO droplet where I used said command to get going. I use ownCloud for card/caldav and ownCloud mail (and sometimes roundcube), my wife uses OsX mail. We both use Android mail clients. There is pain sometimes, when Outlook.com makes my mails vanish and admittedly I have yet to receive spam and have no system in place. This guide helped me a lot [0] there is way to much detail and a lot I didn't use but you'll learn a lot.
For more than I year now all I ever did as maintenance was apt-get update/upgrade.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/how-to...
Ok, it did take me a while to find mail-stack-delivery but it really is a good basis.
I'll back up the downvoted parent comments claim that it's "not that bad". It's caused me a handful of stressful days over the last ten years. I don't have problems with deliverability since I implemented DKIM (as far as I know anyway).
It is easy if you don't care if only half the people you email get your email (i.e. you are a spammer).
I only occasionally had problems with outlook.com, I contacted them, their spam system is an outsourced blackbox. They advised me not to send mass emails... Which I don't of course. Gmail and Apple never gave me any problems. Yahoo banned me after my first mail, no idea why but it seems to work now. I feel like I'm fighting the good fight (decentralize all the things!) so I'll just accept the shortcomings, which are in general, not that many. There are even some nice things like I can have mail addresses that go to both me and my wife, unlimited spam addresses etc.
I'm running my mail server and it's not that hard IMO. There are a lot of guides, standards are easy to understand. I can't say how much one would devote to setup his server, probably few hours should be enough.
Gmail marks my mail as spam, for new recipients, though. I don't care, every gmail user usually checks his spam anyway and when I do care, I'll call person to ensure he got my mail, regardless whether I use gmail or my server.
So you need to start a business where every hour waiting for a response means money lose for you.