Nope. It can’t really be self hosted anymore, as having a residential IP is a straight track to the spam folder. It can be done if you also pay for a mail relay service, but then what’s the point of self hosting when you need to rely on a cloud service anyways.

Hello, I'm selfhosting mailserver with mailcow in docker container. Its easy to setup. I have static IPv4 and domain. Thats all.

I'm using openbsd with dovcot, opensmtpd on a pi. I used mailhardener to get it scoring well. I've had no issues with it getting flagged.

I have run my own email server, and have worked in the commercial web hosting sector.

Honestly, I wouldn't run your own email except as a side project.

It's certainly possible and all the tools are available and easy enough to use, but email in general is a rough combo of super old, and a "big target".

The super old part means that a lot of things that we might consider standard for a modern federated system just aren't there for email. Security is profoundly lacking, and if something gets dropped because of an update, or your computer crashed, there's no guarantee that the system will find a way to get it to you, and the sender might not even know it didn't get to you.

Security wise, you basically have to set everything up correctly all at once, or some system somewhere between you and the recipient will just throw the messages away, and they may or may not tell you.
They do this because all the tools are old, crufty and there's a lot of good exploits that misconfiguration leaves open that automated tools can use to send spam.

Be sure to keep your computer fully patched, and install a malware scanner, even on Linux.

Ultimately, I wouldn't bother running one because the ratio of reward to work is just off for me. I would recommend setting something up for an afternoon though, just so you can see how the pieces work, and get to send yourself an email and know what steps it took.

@DidacticDumbass I use hosted email from Polaris Email, $25/yr, and my domain from Porkbun at $5 for the first year, and access the mail through Thunderbird on phone and computer.

I used to run my own using Modoboa. I've since switched to mxroute for my email.

I did but I stopped. My server had everything set up (DKIM, DMARC, SPF, Spam filtering) but I gave up after some providers wanted me to jump through hoops to get my mail delivered. Also I never had enough outgoing mail to build some reputation.

Well i kinda did that when i started selfhosting way too much a number of years ago... it can be quite annoying trying to get your server out of blocklists (if you need to change servers, because of ip reusing from hosters) and unless you use something like Servercow, it is easy to break things and it kinda hard to find proper tooling for selfservice and stuff.. nowadays i mostly keep it like it is because i don't want to deal with trying to migrate people to a different setup. It's okey and most of the time it just does it job, but it doesn't give too much joy :P

a bit late to the party here, but I didnt see iRedmail mentioned. been using this to host my own email on a VPS for a little over a year now and its great. for me its worth, you can absolutely make it secure, and its not stupid to run it off a local computer. unfortunately most ISPs make it insanely difficult to host on your home network.

Very interesting. Thanks for the follow up.

I use https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver with sendgrid.com as an SMTP relay (recieving emails is easy, sending them successfully is a pain)

I want to do a setup where i use mailcow at home for receiving emails but Amazon ses SMTP for sending, it's possible? Looks like it is, but i didn't investigate it

“No. No, man. Hell no. No, i imagine someone would get their ass kicker if they said something like that”

I don't. But I do have my domain and use a hosted solution, so I'm kind of independent and own my data.