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It should be noted that email servers, no matter the setup, require you to follow strict standards to achieve proper delivery. It’s very easy to get blacklisted, and it’s next to impossible to get off of said blacklist once you’re on it.
I used to host my own mail server with this, but it got to be too much to get my emails to actually send. I was always wondering if my email was actually delivered or if it was silently bounced or sent to spam. Email is the only thing I’m not willing to self host.
So is that why send mail won’t work for sending myself emails about a system? Once upon a time you could do that, but now no more is what I’m reading between the lines, sans a proper mail server??
Yep, pretty much. It used to be doable, but these days it’s very difficult. It’s certainly not impossible, but one slipup and you could get on the deny list forever. It’s just not worth it, since emails are usually pretty mission critical, imo.
Yea, if you are not willing to be meticulous about learning/understanding all the DNS stuff (SPF/DKIM/DMARC), and plan to host this at home, don’t.
I ran this same system for a very long time on a VPS and had no problems with blacklists, but I’m also a career systems engineer that maintained enterprise systems and exchange servers.
Also note how I am speaking of MIAB in the past tense…
I think the better option is to try and avoid email as much as you can, just like SMS. Outdated tech and not secure. At that point, any ol’ existing email service is good enough.
Step 1: Cut a hole in the box (open a port)
I drank a glass of port.
Now what?Join your ship’s surgeon for an evening of Boccherini duets
Shotgunning box wine?
Isn’t that step two?
I feel like step one was “get a box,” but I could be misremembering.
skip to 1:45 for actual instructions, or watch the whole thing
But step 2 is put your junk in the hole.
Sure enough! Thanks, that was fun to watch again.
Ive used this in the past to host an email server. Eventually, my ISP actually stopped allowing people to use mail ports, so I had to discontinue. But it worked very well when I used it many years ago.
Its perfect for a small VPS. Been using it for years.
I do occasionally get places where my email simply will not send to them, even though it follows every email standard properly and isnt blacklisted. For those rare occasions, ill use a third party email address to send, which then forwards everything to my main email.
Call them and tell them to open it. It probably isnt legal for them to close the port if you ask them to open it.
MailCow is similar except uses docker. I expect that will mean easier maintenance as it is less tightly bound to the underlying OS.
I think Mailcow is a fair bit further along in features than this. I used this for a short bit but wasn’t overly impressed, and you are right about how running a docker stack is less hassle for updating.
Lol no
I’ve always been looking for an all-in-one mailserver with a few added features like mailing lists and something like AnonAddy (anonymous mail forwarding). Sadly there doesn’t seem anything like that out there. So I have to configure postfix and dovecot myself. Or make ends meet with a bit more basic features.
Did you try docker-mailserver?
Check out stalwart mail! Not sure it has all the features you need, but it is really flexible through scripting and has got a nice admin web-interface!
Thanks, and I happen to already be aware of it. It doesn’t have any of that. And it’s more complicated to hook it into other things, since the good old postfix is the default case and well-trodden path. I think I’ll try Stalwart anyways. It’s a bit of a risk, though. Since it’s a small project with few developers and the future isn’t 100% certain. And I have to learn all the glue in between the mailserver stuff, since there aren’t any tutorials out there. But both the frontend, and the configuration and setup seem to make sense.
If you need to hook it up to other stuff (where there is a solution using postfix), it’s probably easier to stick with postfix. As an all-in-one mail server I prefer stalwart over docker-mailserver, mailcow, etc. because it’s one unified software with sensible configuration instead of a clusterfuck of services put together using string and duckt tape.
