Hi,
Am evaluating all options for self-hosting my own mailserver. I am probably looking to host it in GCP or AWS, as I don’t want to worry about availability on a really small VM
Would really appreaciate any recommendations from the combined wisdom of this subreddit, on what the most ideal stack to self host would be and any tips to not make any silly security errors.
Would be nice to solve a couple main problems, the main one being, I have older backups in a few different formats, .pst, .olm and .mbox. I want to bring all of these together, in one mail account and have them searchable and syncable to devices.
Is there a mail server that can even import all these formats?
I know email clients can import but I’ve never imported into a server. I’m guessing I could import into a local client then sync to the server somehow?
Did have it so that these mailboxes were imported on one of my PCs in Thunderbird. Oh my god was that awful, the search is absolutely shocking and most of the time, when you need to find an old email you are not at home, sat by the desktop computer.
Am really looking for something with a somewhat decent Web mail interface, I use webmail alot right now. Doesn’t have to be Gmail level smooth, but more than anything I just want search to be good. Fast, presented well and accurate/smart.
Came across AnonAddy Source Code which seems like such an amazing idea that I’ve never come across before, so would love to integrate that into the solution. If anyone is aware of incompatibility between this and certain self host servers would appreaciate the heads up
Not too sure about spam-filters and email AVs. I’m not too clued up on that, obviously I would like to avoid spam and that anonaddy thing might go a long way but if the mail server just has basic rules and sweep features that would be good enough.
Not too worried about the privacy / encryption focus I’ve seen on some self-hosted mailservers. Moving to my own mail server must be somewhat better than what ms/google are harvesting from me data wise at the moment. Even if it is in their cloud.
What is everyone’s experience of these?:
Also is there any mileage in running the web mail client separately? Do they have better search and UX than any of the built in ones?
Thanks in advance
You certainly can do this, but email is one of the few things I recommend not self hosting. My experience working at a spam filtering company really taught me how bad this can be.
Here’s some of the reasons why I recommend against it:
Not getting an important email delivered because it came from a residential IP range and that alone puts you on several anti spam lists.
Not receiving an important email because some email admins put the blocklists on in both directions.
Sudden email issues because your IP changed. And now you have to re apply for all the blacklist removals again.
Internet/power goes offline at home, and some senders aren’t configured to retry.
Get hit with a joe job attack and get gigabytes per hour of spam permanently, with no real way to stop it.
You may be sending and receiving too little email to actually remain in the good behavior cache for many spam filters.
One overeager cronjob or broken script and now you are on even more blacklists.
Misconfigure your server slightly and you are now a spam relay. Spammers scan the internet regularly for targets. You are not small enough to escape notice.
In case of house fire, what is your recovery plan? Have you tested it? Can you send “I’m okay” or insurance docs around if this system is permanently offline? How many weeks do you end up with zero email? How about people who depend on you as their provider?