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From my own personal experience, email on a VPS is completely reasonable. I have used an exim/courier-imap deployment for many years. Don't listen to the naysayers, it's an excellent learning opportunity. Of course, the caveat is that you are ultimately responsible if/when something goes wrong.
For a first-time deployment I would definitely recommend going with some email management software. Setting up a working email stack can involve a lot of moving parts and it's not always easy to get them to work together (spam prevention, virus scanning, IMAP, SPF, etc). Once everything is setup the maintenance effort is essentially zero (assuming you don't have any users sending spam).
Of course, your email server is only going to be as reliable as the VPS (uptime, etc) so make sure you have a reputable provider with stable services. You mentioned a backup MX provider so I'm sure that would be good insurance but it's preferable if your primary MX server is reliable. Lastly, some companies maintain a "reputation" system for mailserver IPs so try to keep the same VPS for your mail to establish that reputation.
Using dovecot you can proxy more than one server. Each server would then need a shared storage, like glusterfs, or use dovecot replication with dsync. It's fairly easy to set this up, but you need to follow suggestions from above like SPF DKIM...
Lets say OP here takes his time to learn everything there is to know about running a mailserver and compare this on the merit of the end-result/product itself.
OVH VPS SSD-1 would cost $3.5/mo. Another one to act as queuing relay and data backup would total $7/mo. After the OS and mail suite, there would be less than ~7 GB of usable space. This is unmanaged and OP would have to outsource outbound relay.
Consider this to what I suggested: P10 ($4/mo. with the offer or $5/mo. otherwise)
Its just cheaper and better than running mail on 2 VPS. Besides are we really comparing a true HA mail solution to a cheap VPS? I'm sure OVH is not giving him free VPS just so that he has some lying around, so save money and the trouble. Get a cheap VPS to learn how to run a mailserver from scratch; just don't use it in production.
It took 2 yrs and a lot of failures, mistakes and hard work to get to this full HA mail solution and its not something you can come up overnight with an installer and a cheap VPS.
Pavin.
You know what a KS-1 is perfect for? Backup MX.
You mean one of those that requires a manual reboot every third day? Only if you add a space in backup, and say that "it's finally back up".
I wouldn't know. Mine runs OpenBSD.
I rebooted my Scaleway C1 for some reason (software upgrade?) 146 days ago, its current uptime. Before that it was up for about a year nonstop. It has never crashed.
Pfft. Try to do the same with a KS-2E.
I guess we shall see
. So far it hasn't crashed, but it's only been a few days.
do you know what time is?
its popcorn time!!
In my opinion an e-mail backup relay server is overrate (although I have one running), certainly for personal use, since e-mail will be queued by the sending servers for quite some time (days) in case of failures anyway. This is how the e-mail system was designed or at least works nowadays. So, if there are any problems (and why would a working setup on a reliable server stop working unexpectedly? uptimes of months / years is quite common for Linux servers), then there is more than enough time to repair things. Also, as said before, I expect people visiting this forum to have one or more servers running for other purposes anyway. So, although you might be right that your solution is cheap (which makes me wondering if it is not too cheap; maybe you are not even around anymore next year), this is in my opinion not a real argument to use your services.
The available disk space is comparable, I don't need a buggy/insecure control panel, I have my backup server running in another part of the world, I haven't had any e-mail solution before that is as fast as my current setup and I don't expect that you can match it, else half a second faster doesn't matter to me, I don't need failover in less than two minutes, I have a geo-redundant MX backup, I don't need a 99,999% uptime SLA, which you really can't guarantee, even Amazon can't, I can have any attachment size I want, but what is the point if the e-mail system / receiver can't handle it, I have webmail, CardDAV/CalDAV (radicale is very simple to setup and a well designed / maintained piece of software), I have a premium SMTP relay in the form of Sparkpost/Sendgrid, I use rspamd for spam filtering and I don't need virus scanning since I am not using a frequently targeted OS, you really cannot beat the DDOS protection of OVH, my setup was free and fun to do, I don't need SPF, DKIM, DMARC and Direct-Admin support.
So, there are zero arguments for me to use your services. What I like/prefer is a self-managed private (privacy) e-mail setup, which is something you can't offer (almost nobody can offer this).
Two year for setting up an e-mail solution? Really? I guess you needed to start over each time, because the stuff you were using was outdated before you could use it. What have you been doing all that time? It is certainly not giving me the cozy feeling "hey, I like to use the services of mailcheap, because it is a professional who knows what he is doing", in fact in IT world two years is ridiculous long, like nano seconds for Mr Data.
As pointed out earlier by somebody else, the OP was looking into a self hosted solution. You are just still trying to promote your services over and over again, something which was pointed out by somebody else before as well. I haven't seen you contributing anything useful on this forum. When are you really going to try to help the OP?
Let me be the example by trying to answer his questions:
Will this be a bad idea? It depends on what you want/expect and if you want to learn something, but in my opinion it is not.
Will the mails go to spam folder? Whatever e-mail solution you use, some e-mails will go to the spam folder that shouldn't go there and some e-mails will go to the inbox which should go to the spam folder. Generally filtering spam with Spamassassin or the in my opinion better rspamd works quite well. The advantage is that you can configure and train it yourself.
And, Can you recommend good but cheap Backup MX service? Basically any server will do. This is my opensmtpd backup server config:
listen on eth0 port 25 table domains file:/etc/mail/domains accept from any for local relay backup backup.example.com hostname example.com accept from any for domain <domains> relay backup backup.example.com hostname example.com(yes, that is really all and even local e-mail will be forwarded to the main e-mail server)
Backup relays are very much important; there are mailservers out there that doesn't retry after a few hours just as there are mailservers that retry upto 5 days or more.
Even if the host doesn't experience problems, there will be network issues or rarely other issues that affect a datacenter. This is why we offer cross-datacenter HA solution. On average, there is a 20% chance of host issues in any given year and upto 33% chance of host and/or network issue. Like I said, this kind of perspective you don't get from your infinite experience of running a single mailserver but running 100s over the course of an year or more.
I don't know how Amazon does things; all I know is I can guarantee 99.999% uptime and there is an SLA to back that up. Every part of the stack is geared for 100% uptime, tested to make sure it can take multiple failures and recover from them. A true cross datacenter HA solution takes time to build and is not something you ought to setup in a few days and go into production.
Pavin.
Let's put it this way. When you give up on self hosted is when:
A. You're sick of dealing with it.
B. You begin to feel like the deck is stacked against you and you can't get the kind of deliverability that you want.
Most people would be just fine with self hosted, and LET is the right place to encourage people to give it a go. If they hit A or B, check out a hosted solution
I might add C: It is cheaper and better than a self hosted setup. I don't know what OP's goal here is and I hope he's okay with me saying this. Just last day contacted me saying he's new to the idea of hosted email and that's perfectly fine; we all had to start somewhere. But if the goal here is to achieve a stable, production ready HA mail solution then what I offered works out to be cheaper and better than a self hosted setup on a VPS. If the goal is to join the self hosted mail club, then he can do it with an installer.
Pavin.
If you are willing to spend a good amount of time installing, configuring, securing, tweaking, adding more functionality to every piece of software that comes with it, sure it's a good way.
I have several Zimbra installations and an iRedMail installation here and there. I've spent a many hours teaching them spam, tweaking the antivirus, choosing a good webmail, securing the ssl, securing the vps, reading articles, trying to learn sieve filters, hardening postfix and dovecot, adding my IP's to whitelists and choosing RBLs to use with my server, using and setting up rDNS, DKIM, SPF, DMARC records... Updating/installing cpan libraries.Trying to make Hotmail accept my mails etc. etc. etc...
If you're willing to work on every aspect of such stuff, a VPS sure is a good way to go as well. But at then of the day you might still encounter some trouble like your mails being rejected because some sysadmin decided to manually update their blacklists and your IP was previously blacklisted. Or that hotmail decided you're not that good of a mail host. Or that with the apt-get get update some component broke. And the unexpected millions of troubles.
TL:DR, if you want to learn and you're confident enough that you can run, maintain and make good use of running a mail server. Go for it. A VPS is just as good as a dedicated server in that matter.
If not, stick with a paid/free service that fits your needs...
I've been running my own personal mail server for about three years, mostly used for mailing lists.
I have dmarc, SPF, rDNS, DKIM set up and it works great when sending everywhere apart from gmail. For an unknown reason the messages always end up in spam. I've checked all RBLs the IP address has never been listed anywhere. I cannot find any information what I've done wrong and Google postmaster tools also do not show anything, most likely due to the small quantity.
Are there any other people over where who've had issues with gmail? How did you resolve them?
I am running my backup relay on a server that hasn't been down unplanned the last five years. The chance that both the main and backup server will be down is very slim. So, backup is not that important as you are trying to suggest to promote your business again.
Use my approach by sending outbound email using SparkPost, SendGrid or similar and you don't have to deal with these kind of issues and you can still run your own server.
Using Mail-in-a-box (https://mailinabox.email/) with €1/m arubacloud works great for me, got 10/10 score via mail-tester.com, just for personal email with some domain.
Using Mail-in-a-box (https://mailinabox.email/) with €1/m arubacloud works great for me, got 10/10 score via mail-tester.com, just for personal email with some domain.
@Dazzle
Interesting with https://mailinabox.email
Can you show us your test result using the following link?
By the way, I am using iRedMail solutions as my email server running with hostus.us VPS. It work great but my score is 98%
[img]http://i.imgur.com/MfipPDr.png[/img]
[img]http://i.imgur.com/unaa65i.png[/img]
Using Sparkpost or a similar service is not recommended for personal email as they (Sparkpost et al.) do not relay mail bounce notifications back to the sender.
e.g. your use 'Joe' sends an email with a typo in the address. Your MTA relays it to Sparkpost, Sparkpost tries to deliver it, it bounces, a bounce notification is registered in the Sparkpost console. End of story. Joe has no idea that his email bounced.
Contrast that with what should happen: your use 'Joe' sends an email with a typo in the address. Your MTA tries to deliver it (perhaps via a compliant relay), it bounces. Your MTA receives a bounce notification which is delivered to Joe. He realizes he made a typo, correct it and resends the message.
Third-party SMTP relays that do it right are available, but not for free.
Possible. Setup myself sparkpost alternative docker mailserver + mautic of course you need take care of all those dns and ptr records yourself to get mail tester highest score
And what happens when your main server is down? Does your backup relay handle SMTP AUTH/IMAP too?
Pavin.
Can you stop self-promoting / derailing this post with your disgusting hijacking of this post? You've lost a sale from me because of your actions on this post, which would had been reselling services.
Ooh, somebody's mad.
You're digging a hole, which could hurt your reputation here, and I'm surprised a moderator hasn't stepped in to control your behavior.
All I see is someone who installed Mailcow on a VPS and gives wrong information on deliverability claiming to be helping here.
Pavin.
At least I'm providing something versus trying to act like I'm being helpful while self-promoting services. What have I provided wrong? Exactly. You never pointed what was wrong out other than everything is wrong except your service.
Edit:
Suggested Mailcow and suggested due diligence. That's it. Whatever your criticism is of my advice is probably all in your head because you're blinded with trying to make the next sale at any and all costs, even if it becomes self-destructive to your reputation.