Your Very Own Email Server At Home

[Lost_in_the_HTTP]

Yeah, we all heard THAT story, but is it practical to do? Simple? Complex? More secure? Less secure?

Aside from a domain name, what all else is needed? Should a techdumb doink even try it?


I'm just getting tired of the normal services. I have accounts at mail.com, Yahoo, Outlook, Proton, Vivaldi and a few others, but they all have some sort of restrictions or other issues. I also have a domain with their flavor of in house mail, but there are fees.

 

[IronWing]

Simple? Yes.
More secure? No.
Banned by just about every ISP unless you buy a business account? Absolutely.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I've had my own since the early 2000's, but the actual hosting is still online. Essentially it's a local IMAP server that uses fetchmail to get mail from the actual online accounts. The server itself does not face the internet. Trying to have mail go straight to a home server is going to be tricky because of the ISP issue. Most don't allow home servers unfortunately so listening to SMTP or similar ports is eventually going to get you suspended. Or they may even just outright block those ports. I do wish ISPs would allow it though as it would be nice to be able to host all my web stuff at home. Ideally what would be nice is if they just gave static IP blocks so you could host stuff on one IP and have personal internet on the other, to still keep it separate.

Mail is a PITA to configure though, the only reason I host it this way is I like having my data on prem so it's easier to backup and accessible even offline, so this setup works out nicely for me. If I switch mail/server/hosting providers it's just the thing of updating the fetchmailrc file, my actual local mail setup never changes. I do want to look at upgrading my setup though, it's actually very old. I would not trust this setup if it was actually facing the internet.

 

[Murloc]

My limited experience: we don't do this at work because it's not worth the hassle, it's not going to be worth it at home either.

Just a random issue I remember: microsoft changed something to their spam filter to make it more secure. Consequence: many companies with self-hosted mail ended up being filtered completely because they didn't update their configuration.

The other thing is that uptime at home is going to be worse than microsoft's or whatever and I don't want to lose mail.

 

[MtnMan]

I have a minimal website related to one of my hobbies, i.e. personal weather stations. I have the bottom (cheapest) hosting plan which works fine for me, running a PHP site, as my weather station is updating the site every 10 seconds.

I don't use it much, but the account also provides email, with up to 100 mailboxes.

 

[IronWing]

I have a minimal website related to one of my hobbies, i.e. personal weather stations. I have the bottom (cheapest) hosting plan which works fine for me, running a PHP site, as my weather station is updating the site every 10 seconds.

I don't use it much, but the account also provides email, with up to 100 mailboxes.

That's what I do for email. I like having the email address the same as the domain name. Having the ability to create mailboxes on the fly is useful when wanting to join services that I know are going to track/data mine the crap out of me or bury me in spam. Having admin control over the mailboxes means that I don't have to remember them all, just look them up on the control panel.

 

[manly]

As others have mentioned, even if your ISP allows port 25 (etc.), email is one thing you do NOT want to self host unless absolutely necessary (i.e. a mid-sized business at a minimum). Because of the prevalence of spam, you will have a hard time getting commercial providers to trust messages from your server.