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Need advice for running my own mail server.
Hello, I'm looking at making the switch away from Google to save money and I was looking at setting up my own mail server. I was thinking of just setting up POP/IMAP and SMTP services on a VPS and calling it a day but then I was doing some SMTP/deliverability tests and it looks like my shared hosting servers for AFreeCloud are all basically ready to go out of the box so I'm wondering if there's any real benefit to building a dedicated mail server over using a pre-configured server?
As for redundancy my current plan is to use the Secure Dragon cPanel server as a backup MX just so I don't lose any e-mails sent to me.
Any suggestions or ideas I'm not considering? This will be for my personal e-mails so I'm willing to accept the drawbacks of not using an e-mail service like GMail, GMX, Protomail, MXRoute, etc...
Comments
In 2019? I wanna say don't bother. I considered it for a long time and for the $10/year I pay MXRoute I feel like I'm getting the world's best deal. No worrying about deliverability and whether I'm blacklisted, no fussing to maintain spam filters, no worrying about patching against every new and exciting MTA exploit.
Like, if you're just looking for a weekend project or something, there are a million other fun new services you can setup for yourself, but email is just awful to work with and it is just going to get worse.
People aren't migrating en masse to Gmail for Business/O365 (or in this forum's case, MXRoute) because the world is lacking for competent email admins, they are doing it because mail hosting just plain sucks
Seriously, just imagine yourself at least twice weekly making that phone call we all hate to make where you sheepishly ask "well did you check your Junk folder?" followed by 5 seconds of silence followed and a heavy sigh on the other end of the line.
Thanks for the feedback but this is something I'm going to do, I just want to get some insight on how to approach it. After spending almost 6 hours deleting over 200GB worth of emails just from the past 6 months I feel it's time to make the switch to my own servers.
If you are headed down that dark path, consider sticking with the all-in-one solutions (mail-in-a-box/mailcow/redmail/whatever) and look into doing all of you outbound mail through SES or something. That way you cut out the headache of worrying about whether you are relaying shit for some spammer or whether you IP range is blacklisted.
Also, store everything in some open format so if you ever change your mind you make the migration easier
Self-hosting isn't going to keep you from hoarding 200GB of junk mail every 6 months - some filtering rules that trash transactional emails after they are a week old is what you probably need
It was more about the costs involved with storing them on GMail and the pain it was to manage because the "delete all" and "clean trash" features rarely work for me, also I would prefer not to have to delete them since they are mostly generated from security cameras and kinda useful.
I think that running a mail server for one's personal use (and for a few trusted users) isn't so hard and a valuable learning experience. I've certainly learned a lot from doing it.
The difficult (and scary) part would be to do it at scale for a lot of users, but it doesn't sound like this is your goal.
For what it's worth I've got quite a bit of experience working with mail servers so that's not the hard part, I'm mainly just wondering if a "roll your own" is beneficial compared to using an out of the box solution that comes with a control panel like cPanel.
@texteditor brought up some good points I hadn't considered like using the open format for storage and using an SMTP service for better deliverability. I currently use SendGrid for all of my apps but I do have a really neat SMTP relay server setup that filters outbound spam that I was using for some AFreeCloud servers for a while.
Whenever I looked at all-in-one mail server solutions in the past, they all seemed to be very invasive ("invasive" in the sense that they take over your system and are difficult to uninstall cleanly), but perhaps I simply didn't have the right attitude. (But if you're using cPanel anyway, then why not ...)
I personally prefer the "roll your own" approach, which is easy enough for a personal mail server, but it would become very challenging at scale.
Running a personal mailserver is no rocket science.
Keep the web decentralized and run your own.
"If you do not run on gmail, your viagra emails will land in spam"
Fake news.
Be aware that downgrading from Google (only if using G Suite Business *!) is a huge pain if you use your account for Android as well (or anything else Google) as it tries to get you to remove your account completely.
I've just been through the same, moving away from Google mail and had to contact them for ages to try and sort it.
I get that, but at the same time is there no better way to store the stuff coming from the cameras? As I had to regularly attempt to explain to the Baby Boomer insurance agents I used to provide helpdesk support for, Email is not the place to store all your files
(Seriously, individual accounts containing 200GB for every six months of mail is also not the types of inboxes that most users have, so the indexing and search algorithms built into most mail servers are probably not prepped to sort through that efficiently. Script a way to strip whatever is so important in those emails and store that stuff in whatever system was intended to process that information)
My goal is to be 100% self hosted by the end of the year. Mostly because I really hate it when I rely on something from a company and they decide to kill it or change it completely (mostly Google, but a lot of other companies are also to blame).
I plan on keeping my GMail account for Android and such, this is only for my personal domains.
Actually no, at least according to my experience. Configuring an email server for 1 domain with 5 users is actually not much easier or less work than for 100 domains and 50000 users.
@KuJoe ,@all
FWIW I'm running my own email server(s) since quite some years and have never regretted it. And while the volume my email server(s) have to handle isn't near 500 GB/yr, or, what's more important, near a bazillion emails in and out, I wouldn't expect any significant load on KuJoe's email server. I guess he could easily run the email services along with some other (also not heavily stressed) services on a 2 vCore, 2GB mem VPS just like I do.
As for standards, I'd think that most sensible email server software would offer those (e.g. maildir). Where things might get a bit hairy is with IMAP (along POP3); it's simply a quite different beast. That's one reason (besides simply neither needing IMAP nor considering a relevant concept for me) why I stuck with a classic SMTP/POP3 (with TLS too) setup.
Regarding "trouble" I disagree with those who prefer a purchased service like Google. Simple reason: one has to do everything their way - and many things are simply not possible.
Why spend two weekends "crossing every t" and "dotting every i" when there is a community of people out there who spent their time doing that just so you wouldn't have to? Normally I'm all about cracking open vim and some man pages and doing something for myself that ten bash scripts on github could have done me be in 20 minutes, but email has a lot of t's and i's.
Yeah, it would have to be something you would dedicate it, this is one of those places where docker shines - isolating solutions that want "the whole system"
This is the same thing I found about always trying to DIY
The real content (i.e. recordings) are stored on local and remote servers, these e-mails are just for alerts with screenshots from the videos and ease of access. Having them in e-mail lets me access them from anywhere which lets me know which files I need to download or view. In the past 3 hours I've received about 500MB of e-mails, not a lot but it adds up quickly and the longer I can go back through my e-mails the easier it is for me. Of course this is not the only reason for wanting to switch to my own hosted solution, it's just the easiest to focus on since it'll be saving me money in the long run.
Why does it need to include the image in the email instead of linking to it on a remote server? That won't compress well at all either
That's all well and good, but as more and more people converge on super-providers like Google and Microsoft, both companies with many more resources to dedicate to anti-spam/anti-abuse, those large providers are going to become much more lenient towards spam coming from each other (knowing the issue will get taken care of) and begin to treat smaller operations much more harshly in spam scoring. This should make sense; no one will block all of Office365 for some spam as fast as they would black some /24 in Brazil for the same amount.
Exactly, Google sent me a notice a while back saying I could no longer backup my own data using the script I was using for years because they didn't trust the script so they revoked the access. I was pissed but I figured I'd accept it and continue on without backups, then I upgraded my phone recently and they removed key features that made my life significantly easier and Google support recommended I use a paid 3rd party app because they have no intention of adding it back to the GMail client.
In the past control panels like cPanel weren't the most reliable and were designed to cater to mass untrusted users so features were slim and every e-mail was a roll of the dice. It seems to have changed a lot over the years as my testing has shown me today but I wanted to see what other people were doing.
My cameras or the surveillance software do not have that option.
This is why I'm considering running my own mail server so I have more control over the IP's reputation (it's really painful when services like SendGrid get blacklisted even if only for an hour because I don't get notified of the e-mails that got dropped during that hour).
Well, that would also really depend on who the 5 vs 50000 users are, but if you feel that there's no significant difference, then good for you.
But the great majority of users nowadays want IMAP. You can say no, use POP3 instead, but most of your 50000 users will want/expect IMAP to be available.
So? I don't think that @KuJoe plans to run a spam operation.
Your theory seems to make sense but I've practically done what I talked about for close to 10 years and my emails have rarely been blocked nor have I found my mail servers IP range blocked/spam-listed (I'm with a reputable good provider and guess KuJoe would have clean IPs/ranges available too).
Funnily I have had more trouble (my mails rejected, etc) when I occasionally used some large corp. providers webmail.
Anyway, my position here is not to convince anyone to do it this or that way but rather to hopefully provide some help on how they can do what they want to do.
The last time I've set up my own email, I used VestaCP (your case cPanel) with PostMark as an outbound relay (they gave me like 35k free credit or so). It wasn't that bad until the server ran out of storage and Vesta won't let me log-in. But in your case, since you run a VPS hosting service, you should have some spare sotrage etc, and linux skills. If so, self hosting email doesn't sound that bad. Just make sure your emai!s go through an outbound relay and have an offsite backup.
p.s. I'm with MXroute now and I'm more than happy with it
@angstrom
Yes that is my experience based on setting up small private as well as mid size (quite some domains and many users) solutions.
From what I understood @KuJoe is about running a server for himself/his family.
Anyway, my major point was that running either one (POP3, IMAP) is no problem but running both may get a bit hairy.
SendGrid, simply by their size, has much more clout when it comes to rectifying the problem. What happens if you keep your IP space pristine, but some guys in subnets on either side of you don't and some overzealous administrator decides to block a whole /16 you're in because doesn't care for making surgical exemptions for the good sysops in that range?
Speaking about trouble managing mail servers, I found that 2GB of RAM is insufficient if you want ClamAV to work. On a 2vCore, 2GB mem VPS with Mailcow and ClamAV enabled you'll be swapping.
@KuJoe
Go for it, I recommend Mailcow for an all-in-one solution that uses Docker.
I think the point I'm meandering towards that email itself is broken and terrible and will continue to break because we are doomed forever to implement an unending stream of RFCs to make a protocol designed at its inception for a world without assholes work in our dimension. I say leave that to someone else
I think even big providers don't waste much time on scanning anymore instead of just stripping suspicious filetypes.
Can you provide some details on your setup? What kind of redundancy do you have? Do you have webmail configured in addition to POP3? What are you using for spam and virus scanning?
I've got a lot of options available thankfully. I can use an SMTP relay, I can change my IP address, or I can send e-mail through GMail (send as).
I actually ran into an issue with ClamAV not having enough RAM last week, ended up giving the server 4GB of RAM to keep all of the services happy. What a hog!
I still don't see how you can say that there's no significant difference in practice between running a mail server for 5 users vs for 50000 users, which includes configuration + all of the associated issues (incoming and outgoing spam, deliverability, keeping the IP address clean, backups), but I've no doubt missed something, so I give up.