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[looking for advice] am I doing e-mail right?
As a way to de-google myself a bit and gain a bit more data sovereignty, I started moving some services to my dedicated server. E-mail is one of these services.
I am doing this for personal e-mail. There is low volume and low number of mailboxes (so far 5 plus a couple of aliases).
This is also a learning experience for me. I am looking for feedback and/or advices on e-mail deliverability (both in and out) and preservation.
Let's assume I am doing already OK with security to keep focus on the former two aspects.
What I would like to achieve:
- Keep my inbox in a service "I own". I know, I know. Let me be happy with it.
- Maximize the likelihood to have my e-mails delivered to inboxes around.
- Maximize the likelihood that, in case my server goes down, I can still receive e-mails before I can intervene.
- Maximize the likelihood of data recovery.
One of my VMs (with encrypted LVM) is hosting Mailcow dockerized. Really happy with it.
On deliverability:
- SMTP is with Amazon SES (I will never, ever, go above the $0.10/month usage tier)
- Amazon SES is happy with my DNS setup. I even added an additional MX for having MAIL FROM my domain instead of Amazon.
- DNS should be set up correctly overall as I receive a 10/10 score on mail-tester.com. Mxtoolbox.com does not complain. I tested with some friends using gmail and outlook and they receive my e-mails in their inbox.
- I have the excellent MXroute as an emergency system. MXroute is configured as "Local Mail Exchanger" instead of "Backup Mail Exchanger" because I actually want e-mail to land into their inbox if my server is down instead of holding it until my server goes back up.
- My MX settings are:
- MX 10 my domain.
- MX 20 MXroute domain.
- MX 30 MXroute additional domain.
- MX 40 SES (in case I ever decide to store e-mails with them).
On preservation:
- The server is a SYS E3-SSD-1-32 and the two SSDs are in RAID1. Sure, not a backup but it's not RAID0 either.
- Mailcow does daily backup on GSuite Drive using rclone (also encrypted). I plan to verify backups on a regular basis.
- I am also backing up the VM via Proxmox on GSuite encrypted because why not as long as GSuite provides its storage.
Before the "just switch to MXroute completely" comments, please note that I am doing this also to learn and to be happy with the delusion of owning my data.
I actually bought their service (the Black Friday 2018 one, it's awesome) because I foresee a day when I decide I do not have enough time for maintaining my own e-mail server.
Some questions I have besides asking for your feedback.
- Are my MX settings OK for what I want to achieve?
- Even though SES costs are basically zero, should I just switch to MXroute for sending e-mails as I am already paying for it?
Thank you in advance for this!
Comments
This is like the most researched and organized original post I've seen in a long time
Seems like a really solid / disaster proof setup, but you have to take into account that if an attacker was able to get his hands on your MX 2 it would be possible to just DDOS your main server down to have the mails coming to a service you don't manage yourself. Not a problem if you trust this service almost as much as your own setup, but this has to be considered.