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Advice on the degree of difficulty of setting up our own Email Server
I am thinking about setting up our own email server.
Does any individual have their own email server and i dont want my email going to spam folder on gmail, yahoo etc etc. can anyone help me how to prevent this?
can give some advice on the degree of difficulty of the process and anticipated costs.
Cheers
Comments
all i can say is gl lol
use a relay, like mail.baby or mailchannels.
gl lol.
step 1 > pray u get a clean ip
step 2 > order a server and then find out the provider does not allow mail server
step 3 > order from another provider and get blacklisted ips
step 4 > repeat
Get an IP that's not blacklisted for mass mailing commonly known as SPAMMING, setup your mail stack idc what you choose everything works in the end, setup DKIM, DMARC, SPF and TLS, 90% chances you won't end up in SPAM, even my server at racknerd sends email to inbox, the only thing i had to do was having that IP removed from Microsoft's BL. Everything working perfectly fine after that, also i am not using it for receiving mails only as an outgoing relay, and as a CDN origin for some static content.
Or use SMTP relays like Amazon SES.
That very much depends on your level of experience/competence/comfort with the tech stack involved. As you question is fairly vague I assume you don't have much so I would recommend going with a well supported pre-packages solution instead of building it from yourself from scratch.
If I'm wrong and you do have plenty of experience with Linux, at least some knowledge of protocols like SMTP, and so forth, and time on your hands, then maybe consider putting together your own arrangement of (for example) Postfix, Dovecot, & SpamAssassin. There are many tutorials for this (https://www.adamantmedia.com/mail-server-postfix-dovecot-spamassassin-on-ubuntu-20-04/ is one of many that pop up in a simple search) though I wouldn't just follow them without learning the stack in more detail as you'll be out of your depth in an emergency if something breaks.
For pre-built arrangements, there are several popular options including things like https://github.com/mail-in-a-box/mailinabox and (if Docker is your bag) https://github.com/mailcow/mailcow-dockerized
Be wary of bigger projects that offer features you don't need (I run Zimbra because for a while a group of use used its extra features like calendar & document sharing) as that'll just pad out your hosting requirements, also commercial-open-source I'd be wary of (again, Zimbra, as their open source edition is becoming build-your-own-only later this year rather than having a supported distribution). I'm moving off Zimbra shortly, probably to go full DIY as I do have experience of full-DIY mail service and Linux admin more generally.
That can be a can of worms.
For sending directly you need a source IP address with a good reputation on a host with a good reputation and the capability to maintain it. You can work around this largely by using a third party like mxroute to distribute outgoing mail. I've not needed to use this sort of service yet, but I plan to if some of my projects ever get off the ground (so my outgoing volume, and balance of personal/project mail, will change). If you plan to send for multiple purposes (personal domain(s), mail sent by hosted applications or your own projects) then consider separating them instead of using the same sending server(s), that way a cockup affecting the reputation of one will be less likely to affect the other.
You must make sure that you have SPF and DKIM properly configured otherwise many receivers will dump you in with the junk even if you do have a high-rep source address.
I've had very few delivery issues over the years but:
Admin time. Be careful not to underestimate this. Those fire-and-forget mail-server-in-30-minutes tutorials give a false sense of this ongoing need being insignificant. You need to make sure you keep up-to-date with security updates, deal with any delivery issues yourself, etc. Make sure you pay attention to projects going stale so security updates stop, etc., so you can plan a move to something else if needed.
Hosting costs will be minimal unless you are sending a lot. If this isn't personal or small business email then you'll maybe want more capacity. If you are sending bulk email then, well, please don't!
Additional costs will be incurred from an external mail relay, but again this is small unless you are mass mailing, and probably worth it for the reduction in delivery issues you'll experience.
We can't give any more accurate guestimates of cost and effort without a lot more detail than “I want to setup an email server”.
i got a dedi from ovh, and my ips are clean so far
good advice , but now i m thinking not to setup own mail sserver , it would be wise to get good package from mxroute rather then setting up mail server ,
so far my assumtion is ips get blacklisted sooner or later , so u will endup in a loop of changing ips frequently
It depends what you do, never had any issues
Despite what people are saying I have been running mail servers on OVH since 2017. Took about 1 year to get off all the regular greylists and 2 years to finally be removed from the Microsoft greylist sending about 25-500 emails a day. It will be hard if you are using it for just personal use. You can't gain reputation if you don't send emails.
Ive been running one on a $12 Hetzner cloud vps for almost 3 years with no issues at all, I originally thought it would be a headache to run but it has never been anything close to it.
I used mailcow to set it up, its probably the easiest solution to get a whole mail server stack and has other features so you can configure or add extras to your server like nextcloud.
Upgrading the whole setup is super simple since its Docker. Just run the
update.shscript and it will pull any new containers and restart all the stuff that was upgraded. It also has a good ip ban system that scans various service logs including the webui for attacks.https://mailcow.email/
https://docs.mailcow.email/