upvote

points

by ebrahimh2 hours ago |
comments
upvoteby gerdesj1 hours ago|
next
[-]
"Self-hosting email fully is tedious/unnecessary"

If you IT, why do you particularly consider self hosting email as tedious?

reply
upvoteby ebrahimh1 hours ago|
parent|
next
[-]
I've never tried to set it up even though I know it can easily be done with things like mailcow.

The downside is never really knowing if your email reached your recipient (maybe it got blocked by Gmail because of your IP, maybe some other reason). If I use Gmail/proton etc, then I can be pretty sure that the other person got my email.

reply
upvoteby caymanjim46 minutes ago|
parent|
[-]
You'll know from bounced email and logs, which you should have monitoring setup on.

It's not trivial to run your own email stack, but it's not hard either. It's more tedious than anything. Once it's up and running, it's low-maintenance. And it's fairly trivial to avoid spam. I get vastly more spam in my Gmail than I do on my self-hosted domains.

The biggest challenge with self-hosted email is getting an IP address that's not blocked or carrying low reputation. Most VPS IPs from e.g. Digital Ocean, Linode, Hetzner, AWS, etc. are going to get blocked from Google (the strictest) and Yahoo, Hotmail/Live/MS, etc. Cloud providers often block incoming and outgoing mail ports, too. I have a Digital Ocean VPS and my account is old enough to be grandfathered into the old policy, which means my email ports aren't blocked. I used to have no trouble sending email anywhere from my VPS, until I downsized it and got stuck with an IP in a bad reputation CIDR. Now I use smtp2go for relaying outbound mail, but still handle all inbound mail. 10/10 score on mail-tester.com, and I never have any problems or need to do any maintenance.

reply
upvoteby monocasa24 minutes ago|
parent|
[-]
A few major vendors (I want to say Microsoft was among them) were infamous for silently dropping email without bounce backs. They'd perform then whole protocol sequence as if they accepted the email, then simply never actually put it in that user's inbox or even spam folder.
reply
upvoteby kristofferR50 minutes ago|
parent|
prev|
[-]
Because it's not about setting it up, it's about not getting outgoing mail perceived as spam by someone. Borderline impossible without scale. Even doing everything correct is not enough.
reply
upvoteby birdsongs1 hours ago|
prev|
[-]
You can do this with Proton?? How does it handle decryption/encryption, etc?

Would absolutely love to do this, proton frontend annoys me at times.

reply
upvoteby ebrahimh1 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
I actually don't use protonmail but you should be able to access your mail with IMAP (both iCloud and Gmail support it so proton should as well).

If by encryption you mean PGP etc, that's handled in roundcube I believe.

mbsync mirrors your protonmail inbox to disk, dovecot shares that mail folder through IMAP, and roundcube or some other frontend connects to dovecot.

For gmail/icloud IMAP, you can't use your regular account password, you have to create an "app password" and use that password for mbsync.

reply
upvoteby birdsongs1 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
Yeah they have integrated end to end encryption, this made me go digging, and I found they have a bridge app that handles it.

https://proton.me/support/bridge-for-linux

Excited to set this up, I had assumed it wasn't a possibility.

reply