Running mailserver is hard man

greattomeetyou

deank said: Yeah, most pay 3rd party to do mail delivery nowadays.
Seriously not worth the extra headache.

Unless your mail/privacy is more important.
Don't we all remember our politicians use private mail server?

There are reasons why mail setup are hard (intentional and for legacy reasons) and big company can offer cheap mail services.

They want intel. Some of mail providers are intelligent agency subsidized.
You pay it with your privacy, and their thirst to "machine learn" you.

cazrz

I suggest learning more about DNS first. When setting up proper mail server, smtp server, relay , anit-spam, delivery , etc... You will find yourself that there are lots of DNS related topics. DNS records are NOT just copy paste of some text (eg. spf, mx, txt).

Once you are comfortable on how the DNS works and gained more knowledge about what are those DNS record types and what to put in those records, then go back on trying to setup a mail server.

IMHO.

angstrom

@sanvit said: AFAIK pointing MX record to an IP address should technically work, but never done it.

It would go against the specification (RFC), and so most registrars won't allow one to set an MX record to an IP address.

The idea is that an MX record points to a host (hostname), which allows for the case where the host is reachable over more than one IP address.

intelpentium

greattomeetyou said: There are reasons why mail setup are hard (intentional and for legacy reasons)

I doubt they made it intentionally hard. Mail server setup is no more complicated than HTTP server setup. HTTP has even more complicated security headers. It's just that we don't spend even fraction of a time configuring mail we spend configuring HTTP servers.

greattomeetyou said: You pay it with your privacy, and their thirst to "machine learn" you.

AFAIK you can't even force encryption for your personal SMTP server:

A publicly-referenced SMTP server MUST NOT require use of the
STARTTLS extension in order to deliver mail locally. This rule
prevents the STARTTLS extension from damaging the interoperability of
the Internet's SMTP infrastructure.

From RFC 2487

Tripleflix

i use mailcow on a vps with a clean IP (@hetzner) works like a charm. if ur really worried about deliverability u can use any of the services that can relay (aws is cheap i hear)

kalipus

yandex pdd

armandorg

@SirFoxy said:
Calculate the time spent vs paying Google $5 for incredible spam filters & delivery.

Nah.

MXRoute with @jar feels better.

marrco

mailcow + SES only for problematic destinations (w/ mx @ Microsoft and little else. Needs manually setup and maintenance)

Janevski

Network is fast, server is hard, my man!

isunbejo

I used Zimbra collaboration for almost two years, now I migrate to gsuite, and enjoy life more, not thinking about anti-spam maintenance, IP cleaning, PTR, SPF, DKIM, and other nonsense like headaches.

If you don't need collaboration facilities, use an email provider, give your headaches to him, you just give a few dollars, that's enough.

but if only need up to 5 users, use a free mail service such as zoho mail, of course, with limited features, just web email with custom domain.

Life is beautiful my man!