I appreciate everyones opinion, and I’m aware of the pro’s con’s of self hosting email, regardless of platform. With that being said, I had a question about hosting email from home hardware but tunneling traffic from an external site.
So I want to host my own email, i’ve done before and found it very fun and useful. I hosted it on digital ocean, but never went too far with it, just propped up a server, sent a few emails, and shut it down I’d like to host it at home so I can make use of existing hardware.
What are my options for tunneling traffic so I don’t have to expose my home IP or home network directly to the internet? and also obviously bypass the issue of most isp’s blocking email. Also, are there any other services that I should consider to help route my email? I’ve heard of services such as external mail relays that help improve deliverability and reduce the chance of email being marked as spam or blocked.
I genuinely find email admin to be very interesting, and think self hosting would be a great way to keep advancing my skills and learn more about security, etc.
Just don’t. It’s not worth it.
Don’t do it, just don’t do it. Self hosting email remains the most painful of all self hosting experience for most people here.
So you won’t get your mail delivered. It’s not 1998.
What you probably want is an SMTP Relay on the VPS that forwards incoming mail to the server at home. Because if you have a power outage and on the sender’s Side the SMTP Server is not configured correctly, you will loose EMails
Simplelogin or AnonAddy
I use Dynu as a forwarding service. My ISP blocks port 25 so that is my workaround. I use mail cow, it has its own spam filtering. Been doing if for about 7 months… so really a newbie. I only do it for my family, 7 people with about 80 aliases. Everywhere I go gets their own email for spam- for example: costco@domain.com or homedepot@domain.com… it is kinda fun to see who is selling my email.
So dynu would just be for forwarding emails to your server, but what do you use for outgoing mail? nvm, just saw this: https://www.dynu.com/en-US/Email/Outbound-SMTP-Relay Seems like this might be the most affordable way to go.