Like the title says, I’m new to self hosting world. 😀 while I was researching, I found out that many people dissuaded me to self host email server. Just too complicated and hard to manage. What other services that you think we should just go use the currently available providers in the market and why? 🙂thank you
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E-mail
In my opinion, cloud storage for (zero knowledge) backup. Your backup strategy should include a diversity of physical locations. I had a house fire a few years ago. Luckily, my data drives survived, but if they hadn’t, my cloud backup would’ve been invaluable.
A password manager because if anything goes wrong, you’ll be completely screwed.
What you SHOULD absolutely self host though is a password manager, so you can be in control of your most sensitive data.
Regarding email, I think everyone should absolutely self host it, but it’s less and less viable in this google/Microsoft duopoly world. But ideally everyone would self host it. The reason why people advise against it really comes down to lack of real competition, and the two tech giants dictating how we violate every RFC possible.
A password manager because if anything goes wrong, you’ll be completely screwed.
What you SHOULD absolutely self host though is a password manager, so you can be in control of your most sensitive data.
Wot?
Okay I understand that email hosting is bad for SENDING email , but what about only RECEIVING email , isn’t it a good idea to keep my stuff private ? I rarely send personal emails, and like to avoid my data being used for marketing purposes Is that bad to have smtp imap open on dynamic ip address ? Just asking your opinion
Antispam is hell, just saying
I’m doing exactly that, and it works like a charm. Get a DynDNS, backup mx and SMTP relay and you’re good, or get a domain provider like strato.de that already includes all three with the domain.
Spam is also manageable. I get maybe 1-2 per day that make it past the filter, and I do have to add some custom keyword filters from time to time, but that’s about it. Fetching updated filter lists and self-learning from past errors keeps the filter up to date and is completely automated.
Don’t host your own email server.
Just trust me.
Meh, been doing it for 5 years now with minimal issues. Had one issue come up where my domain was flagged as malicious, but was solved in a few days and some emails to security vendors.
I think it’s important that those who can, and are educated enough to keep it running properly do host their own. Hosting your own email should be encouraged if capable because it helps reduce the monopoly, and keep a little bit of power for those who want to retain email privacy.
I agree with KN4MKB. I’ve been hosting my own mail server for decades. Not one issue. I use that in lieu of a mail service provider (Google immediately comes to mind), as their EULA service agreement will tell you that - since you’re using their service, on their servers - anything goes. Read the fine print on Gmail, and you’ll see. 😉
I did for years quite successfully. Ultimately blocklists did me in however - I don’t have the knowledge to resolve those timely and it became a headache I couldn’t tolerate at that time.
Why?
They are not hard to setup, easy to keep running (once going they pretty much just work). If you follow the right steps you can avoid being undeliverable and keep people from abusing your sending server (as a relay).
I did it anyway some time ago and I’m really happy with it. I’m using my own email addresses for absolutely anything by now.
Passwords:
-> You want to have immediat access to them, even if your house burns downNotes:
-> You want to be able to read the documentation how to fix your selfhosted service, even when your selfhosted services are downPublic Reverse proxy:
-> A reverse proxy is only as safe as the applications behind. And NO, most selfhosted-applications are not hardened or had security audits
(reverse proxy with a forward authentication proxy is something different)Primary backups
Don’t self-host email SMTP or public DNS. They’re hard to set up properly, hard to maintain, easy to compromise and end up used in internet attacks.
Don’t expose anything directly to the internet if you’re not willing to constantly monitor the vulnerability announcements, update to new releases as soon as they come out, monitor the container for intrusions and shenanigans, take the risk that the constant updates will break something etc. If you must expose a service use a VPN (Tailscale is very easy to set up and use.)
Don’t self-host anything with important data that takes uber-geek skills to maintain and access. Ask yourself, if you were to die suddenly, how screwed would your non-tech-savvy family be, who can’t tell a Linux server from a hot plate? Would they be able to keep functioning (calendar, photos, documents etc.) without constant maintenance? Can they still retrieve their files (docs, pics) with only basic computing skills? Can they migrate somewhere else when the server runs down?
Also, check out “ciphermail”. It’s end-to-end encryption mail server.
lol
I’d say backups. At least it shouldn’t be only local. I follow the rule of threes: two local copies and one off site with backblaze. Yeah, it ties up a not insignificant amount of disk space I could use for other things, but dammit, I’m not loosing my wedding photos, important system configurations, etc.
People saying email, look into using external SMTP servers as relays. Your domain most likely comes with at least one email account with SMTP access. You can use that as a relay to send personal/business emails from your server using the provider’s reputable IP addresses.
Aside from other stuff mentioned here about email. I always assumed I’d become a target for spam that I’d have a harder time filtering out to the point it stops being worth it to have a custom email address.
That and I can almost guarantee I would end up screwing up the backup of my inbox and losing everything rending the whole endeavour pointless.
surprisingly my custom email address gets by far the least amount of spam. I had maybe 20 spam mails over the last year. Meanwhile my gmail address sometimes gets that every single day lol
Aside from other stuff mentioned here about email. I always assumed I’d become a target for spam that I’d have a harder time filtering out to the point it stops being worth it to have a custom email address.
Can’t work out how or why hosting it at home would mean more spam? Your email address gets on a list that gets pulled by spam merchants, hosting it at home doesn’t make any difference here.
It’s an assumption, not based on evidence. I’ve never done it and not looked into the software solutions so I assume a FOSS selfhosted email solution wouldn’t have the inbuilt antispam stuff that mainstream providers, say outlook, who host probably millions of email addresses would have.
Anti-spam was invented in FOSS self-hosted setups.
Personally I don’t think it’s worth hosting recursive dns resolvers. Most of the options with ad blocking are single points of failure and when it breaks the household acceptance factor is just too low.
Just…set up two RPIs with Pihole instead of one? Chances are your router can have a fallback DNS. Sure, you have to update the rules in both places, but honestly it’s not a big deal, and you now have redudancy.
I’m running 2 powerdns recursors and authoritative servers, and 2 piholes (long story why so many), and none of them have failed on me so far, and when I took one of them offline, I didn’t notice anything because the other took over. And if anything REALLY fails, I’ll just switch my router back to using cloudflare or Google or quad9 temporarily, and at least Internet access will be restored so people can at least browse the internet.
Pihole also has an API and a home Assistant integration, so you can create an AdBlock toggle switch for others, in case it blocks something and they need immediate access. Not ideal, but it’s a doable workaround.
This is really something that’s super easy to self host, and mitigate if something goes wrong. Especially since that commercial router is already a single point of failure for most households.
Chances are your router can have a fallback DNS.
Chances are it can’t. You can probably set multiple DNS servers (anywhere, not just routers) but they aren’t a primary/secondary sort of deal. Most traffic might be weighted towards the first one in a list but you will find traffic still hits the others.
Email. I always recommend AWS SES. Use it at as an SMTP relay and any internal services gets restricted access through IAM.
I think there’s a hangup on the term “self-host” where some people are assuming it’s going to be exposed to the Internet.
I self-host a ton of stuff that is only available inside my home network or through my VPN, which is not publicly discoverable. I would never open a TCP port to the world from my home network. That’s how you end up on shodan.
So yeah, if it has to accept inbound connections from arbitrary other systems on the dirty internet (email, mastodon, etc), it’s not happening on my network, and probably not at all because it’s a pain in the ass to stay patched.
I don’t self host anything where it would impact me unduly if it went down while I was on holiday to the point where I’d have to break state and go fix stuff.
I don’t want to have to leave my beer or beach and head off to fix things like an email server, restore a password manager db etc. so anything like that which is critical to the point where an outage would prob have me do so means I pay someone else.
That’s an underrated razor. Not the whole decision tree for me, but a huge part of it.
