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Have you tried self-hosting your own email recently?
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this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2025
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I’ve been hosting my own email servers for 20 years without issue. But email systems were a huge part of my IT career so it was easy.
It works great if you have static IPs and know what you’re doing in terms of following best practices. If you’re missing those two things you’re going to have a bad time.
If you have the statics and want to learn, I’d recommend purchasing a test domain and getting the kinks worked out before you move a domain you care about to your own system.
Any wisdoms to share?
I really like the idea of having my own server, where I could have a bunch of cool stuff like email, VPN, Nextcloud, and so much more. The primary reason why I don’t have a server like that, is because I can’t trust myself to follow the best practices. For a while now, I’ve been thinking that I should hire a proper professional to take care of all that.
My hosting company has an outgoing mail server that I can use and as long as they’re doing the external DNS of the domain in question it works perfectly well.
Mostly though, from my own domain I am only sending automated messages from applications I host like NextCloud or Grafana from a “no-reply” address. There would almost certainly be privacy implications if I were to use it for personal mail.
So, if yoy are looking for a simple way to get email notifications from automated processes, this ain’t a bad way to go about it. If you want more, I would consider who can ready your outgoing mail and if you are ok with that.