My opinion after self-hosting for over a decade is that, yes, it's easy. See my comment further inside the thread for my take on whether or not it's advisable.
I used to self-host email, it was mostly all initial setup and then it just worked for years. Eventually I got a bit wary about the security side of an internet-accessible box and decided to move the whole thing over to AWS SES. Wrote it up here:
Not an expert, but I suppose that you can safely receive email using a self-hosted SMTP server. Sending it without being blacklisted / greylisted is trickier. If you don't want to muck with obtaining an IPv4 with a good karma, there are options to send via large providers, such as GMail (IIRC free), or AWS SES, or things like Sendgrid or Brevo. The latter may be effectively free if you send only a handful of emails per day.
OK: it's easy, unless you're the "atechnical" sort.
Is it recommended? I'm torn here, because the big beasts are systematically spam/junk-classifying and even rejecting e-mail sent from independent MXes despite ticking the right checkboxes (FQrDNS, SPF, DKIM, DMARC) and having a clean IP-address in a tidy network.
I’ve been self hosting E-mail (send and receive) with SSL and IMAP, for my family and a few hobby clubs on a $5 Linode VPS for at least a decade, probably more. Very few problems over that time period. Basic exim4/dovecot setup. Occasionally some crappy ISP’s spam filter gets too aggressive but I follow their unblocking procedure and am fine from there. I do keep my old empty gmail account around in case that changes but I don’t use it much.
The fear around self hosting seems overblown. LetsEncrypt falls over more often than my E-mail.
I host a few client marketing & transactional mails.
Mostly sending stuff from marketing automation/newsletter software.
Not an issue. Will be migrating the first few domains of off paid google workspace E-Mail to a self hosted solution. I actually don’t expect too much trouble.
But that’s currently still a hypothesis. I have seen a few people do that successfully. So I know it’s possible. Still. Not having hosted a mail infrastructure in 20 odd years…
daneel_w|1 month ago
alance|1 month ago
https://alexlance.blog/email.html
rationalist|1 month ago
Easy: I don't think so.
Advisable: Hell no.
I believe you have to constantly maintain it, and good luck with deliverability.
Anyone: correct me if I'm wrong.
nine_k|1 month ago
daneel_w|1 month ago
OK: it's easy, unless you're the "atechnical" sort.
Is it recommended? I'm torn here, because the big beasts are systematically spam/junk-classifying and even rejecting e-mail sent from independent MXes despite ticking the right checkboxes (FQrDNS, SPF, DKIM, DMARC) and having a clean IP-address in a tidy network.
ryandrake|1 month ago
The fear around self hosting seems overblown. LetsEncrypt falls over more often than my E-mail.
sdoering|1 month ago
Mostly sending stuff from marketing automation/newsletter software.
Not an issue. Will be migrating the first few domains of off paid google workspace E-Mail to a self hosted solution. I actually don’t expect too much trouble.
But that’s currently still a hypothesis. I have seen a few people do that successfully. So I know it’s possible. Still. Not having hosted a mail infrastructure in 20 odd years…