Self-hosting E-Mail General: Fuck big tech edition

Even though E-Mail is a decentralized protocol, it is ruled by big tech. Barly anyone still has an E-Mail server. This general is dedicated to hosting your own E-Mail. Share your MTA's, MDA's, spam filters, etc. as well as how you configure them. Every set up is welcome: From one man setups to sysadmins of E-Mail servers that have multiple users. >MTA https://www.postfix.org/ https://opensmtpd.org/ https://www.exim.org/ https://www.courier-mta.org/ >MDA https://www.dovecot.org/ >spam filters Rspamd SpamAssassin DSpam How is your delivery to big tech? Have you had any issues with delivery? How did you solve it? Where are you hosting your E-Mail server? Do you back up your E-Mail server? Where and how? Good writeups on how to set up an E-Mail server: https://poolp.org/posts/2019-09-14/setting-up-a-mail-server-with-opensmtpd-dovecot-and-rspamd/ Ready to use solutions: https://mailinabox.email/ https://github.com/LukeSmithxyz/emailwiz https://www.iredmail.org/ https://www.zimbra.com/ https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver Looking to host your own E-Mail? Ask questions and share links.

I'm currently using Migadu as my E-Mail host but am looking to switch to self-hosted. I set up my first E-Mail server yesterday for another domain with Postfix, Dovecot and rspamd. Sending and receiving seems to work, but I have to do a little more reading and testing to make sure that only authorized users can send E-Mail. IMAP and SMTP seem to not be working yet, but I'm working on that, too.

>>66976 I have been thinking about self-hosting my email but how do I make sure that I won't get blacklisted by gmail, outlook et al? Good resources for newbies: https://linuxcommand.org/tlcl.php + https://landchad.net + https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Security Also, some food for thought: https://ikiwiki.iki.fi/faq/dmarc_spf_considered_harmful More about Email... If you want to send private email (encryption) and/or make sure that the recipient can verify that it was really sent by you (signed email), you need to use PGP/GPG: https://emailselfdefense.fsf.org/en/ (make sure to copy-paste the encrypted text to your webmail if you use a webmail. Also, do not trust keys that are generated by your email provider!) You can (optionally) upload your (public) PGP key to: https://keys.openpgp.org if you want others to have easy access to it. If you are looking for a good email client, I recommend (Neo)Mutt (TUI) or Claws Mail (GUI. also, see: https://digdeeper.club/articles/software.xhtml#claws ). Also, STARTTLS considered harmful: https://lwn.net/Articles/866481/ Do not send HTML email! >https://cromwell-intl.com/cybersecurity/html-email.html + https://useplaintext.email Let others read their mail with the fonts they want to use! This is also important for accessibility reasons. It's also better for security, too! You can still __underline__ and use *"bold" text*. For inspiration, read text files from 90s: http://textfiles.com/directory.html GNU Mailman is often used for making mailing lists. How to use mailing lists (send mail): https://www.grant.pizza/blog/mailing-list-guide/ & https://curl.se/mail/etiquette.html (also this, if you want to read more about proper netiquette: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1855 ) (still unsure how to post? read posts from (e.g.) OpenBSD mailing list archives: https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&r=1&w=2 || https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech) Always use "reply to list" or "reply to all" function. Use Bottom Posting style formatting. Break long lines (usually max. 72 chars or max. 80 chars). GNU Emacs has auto-fill-mode and (Neo)Vim has a similar option: http://blog.ezyang.com/2010/03/vim-textwidth/

>>66976 I cheat and use mailinabox

>>66976 >opensmtpd+rspamd+clamav+dovecot This is my based stack. Though the documentation for some parts is a bit rough.

>>66991 >DMARC >SPF >Harmful Following that path is sure to get your mail delivered nowhere. The alternative is DNSBLs that are fuarrrking everyone but big tech over. >claws Generally decent but full of small bugs that'll drive you up the wall. All GUI email clients on GNU/Linux are soykafty in their own right. The only one that has an OK UX is Thunderbird, but it is blaoted as fuarrrk and eats CPU cycles like there is no tomorrow. >HTML email Yeah, it is cancer that should be eradicated upon the face of the Earth. I'm still toying around with the idea of responding with a 550 for anyone that sends HTML mail. >>66992 Not real and homosexual.

>>67001 It’s just werks, just install Ubuntu on a vps and run script. What can I say, lazy yeah but everything works as expected, open source, self hosted and not outlook or gmail subscription.

>>67001 Ignore this advice from a postmaster larper. Do set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC if you want 90% of recipients to be able to receive your emails.

>>66991 >Also, some food for thought: https://ikiwiki.iki.fi/faq/dmarc_spf_considered_harmful The link is surprisingly sparse with information. It just points out that the author thinks these things are bad but the reasoning is either surface level or just plain missing... >>66992 >I cheat and use mailinabox That's okay. Some people just don't feel like becoming a full sysadmin to set up an E-Mail server, so you're all good. >>67000 >Though the documentation for some parts is a bit rough. I found that the documentation for a lot of it is a bit rough. Postfix in particular just feels like this monster of configuration options and it's really hard to know where to start. OpenSMTPD on the other hand seems much more approachable, yet I still went for Postfix as I felt like accepting the challenge. So far it has worked out. >>67001 >>HTML email >Yeah, it is cancer that should be eradicated upon the face of the Earth. Its only debatable use case is marketing spam from companies that lack other forms of attracting the recipient's interest. HTML E-Mail was a mistake.

I host how to set up an OpenBSD+OpenSMTPD+rspamd+Dovecot stack on https://draft.websteading.net/smtpd/. It's been serving as a living document as host mahjong.email. I've hosted my own email for 3 years (MTA: postfix 1 year, opensmtpd 2 years). After trying to understand how luke smith's mailwiz configures postfix, I've been mortified by that daemon. Very recently I've moved over to a multi-domain mail server and migrated all my personal mail to the new box 2 weeks ago. It's been working quite well and the infra is set up with Ansible so it's very easy to make a sandbox infra, or recover if I make a fuarrrkup or my VPS host catches fire. My next goals are to rewire smtpd -> dovecot via lmtp instead of dropping it in the user's mailbox directly, so that it becomes very easy to rewire to a separate mailbox server if I wanted to, or (if I assume right?) to enable Dovecot to preprocess incoming mail with Sieve or what have you. Beyond that, I really dislike how virtual users now mean there's two sources of truth for accounts between smtpd and dovecot. If anyone's OpenBSD-minded and wants to set up a mail server, please let me know any comments/criticisms on the tutorial so I can help improve it for other people. Thanks!

Lainon, how are you getting updated on what big tech mail expecting from a mail server? I.e. is there a mailing list/rss/whatever with what config options to update, what DKIM/DMARC setup is needed today? Currently my mail is with migadu, but I'm slowly preparing to roll over to self-hosted one. Got burned there once where IIRC the recommended setup for DMARC changed, noticed only when people started telling me that gmail puts my mail to spam.

I am using https://www.iredmail.org/ it's pretty based

Thoughts on this website? https://temp-mail.org/

How come I don't see anyone mentioning https://maddy.email/ ever? I have been using it for years and it's a way simpler than the legacy Postfix+Dovecot+OpenDKIM+OpenSPF+OpenDMARC+ChildSacrifice stack of maintenance horrors.

>>68575 this seems awesome, what is your use case? i'm thinking about setting up a server for secure non-institutional professional mail according to the workaround.org guide but am not particularly interested in multiple user accounts or his sql database approach and this seems like a good option.

I think it's important to ask yourself what you're looking to get out of self hosting mail server software before beginning. Personally I realized I only needed an MTA to accomplish what I was setting out to do, which made things MUCH easier. My only requirements were being able to send email to myself using a domain I own but have hosted for me by an email provider (for system administration--I need to know when a service fails). For this, msmtp worked perfectly following information found at these links: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Msmtp https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd/Timers#MAILTO https://superuser.com/questions/1588284/how-to-run-systemd-user-service-with-multiple-unix-groups-ldap-provides-group/1588291#1588291 https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.unit.html Basically the idea is to get it working from the command line first so that you can send email to yourself using msmtp then transition to making it into a systemd service that emails you on failure. The tricky part for me was getting my email password to be sufficiently protected while not allowing the service to run as root. Spoiler alert: you want the service to run as the "mail" user and group with "SupplementaryGroups" set to "systemd-journal". This allows you to set file permissions on your email password to only be group readable by the mail group and is good enough for a personal computer / server. The last bit is that you should create drop-in files for services you want to be notified of on failure, not edit the services directly like the wiki recommends. I have a full step-by-step write-up on how I set mine up but there may be licensing issues due to pulling information from various sources so I'm describing the information you'd need instead.

>>66976 I have had fantastic results with https://maddy.email/ and been running it for 2+ years now - no sweat. MTA and MDA in a single static binary, one config file (mine is ~150 lines for the whole thing).

I'm new to linux and would like to setup something like Windows' native "mail" program where you can just remain logged into your account outside a browser, I looked into thunderbird for that but as I was reading about setting up SMTP and the like I read that thunderbird was (like other mozilla stuff) compromised. What would you recommend for my goals? PS: my host is hotmail because I've used that for years and it would be difficult to completely replace it at this point, but I hope to be able to do it in the future

>>72413 Claws mail is a really neat email client

>>67500 I used it in the past for RPI because works under arm, and it do it pretty nice. I don't like how there is a $$$ way for a gui for some features, but you can work perfectly doing the changes to BBDD directly.

>>76414 I don't host my own mail anymore because it was for have a secure way to send it to me securely , but the senders , even the most biggest ones of my country keep sending email without use of TLS. If you force them to use it, you will miss emails. I never take care of this until I notice it hosting it. Now I threat it like a paper carried in a classroom, I don't use it or plan nothing about it anymore. Simply try not use Gmail or anything with $$$ interest with your mail.

Realistically, what are the costs associated with running your own e-mail server? What does a person need to run one? I don't want to go down this rabbit hole only to figure out that I need something I don't have.

stop using decentralized to describe federated b0ewmer garbage. decentralized generally means each peer runs his own soykaf, like in torrent. email is like the web in that you need a hoster or you can make your own and then stick out.

>>78139 Yeah federation is soykaf. Activitypub-based services mostly devolved into a bunch of users running their own little petty fiefdoms. It's as if the worst parts of 2000s era discussion forums and contemporary social media platforms were combined to create the worst thing ever. We need true peer-to-peer technology. (A return to uncensored newsgroups would also be nice, but is probably unviable with the current political climate)

>>78130 I run a simple mailserver in docker for subscribing to some mailing lists without cluttering other inboxes. The cost of the vps + domain is $25 a month an i can run other things in the vps, so not very expensive. It's just a bit boring setting up mx records and dns, but google/outlook won't even let you send/receive email from your server if you don't

>>76415 Do you live in a place where everyone is self-hosting email but without using TLS or something?

>>78204 P.S. I personally use the good old postfix dovecot opendkim spamassassin combo. Configuring all this was a nightmare, so I do keep a backup of all the configuration files.

>>68436 Most services do not allow you to create accounts under email addresses from this site.

>>78149 $25 a month? This is hardly the minimum price point. I pay <$5/month for a cheap vps and $6 a year for a .top domain