Self-host your mail server

I was running Postfix+Dovecot+Seive+SpamAssassin+Fail2ban+certbot+spf+dkim+reverse-ip+<other random crap>

It worked! Receiving email was overall pretty easy. I know I also did things the "hard way" by ad-hoccing all that together, and today there are a lot more out-of-the-box solutions that do all that for you. But still. Being a full-time email administrator is a job I will never do again unless I'm getting paid for it.

You know what really sucked? Deliverability. Frequently, emails I would send would just ... vanish ... no warnings, no errors, no failures. From my end, everything was perfect. Until days later, people would follow up with me and say, "Are you going to send that email?" ...

I had a business IP (Comcast Business). The IP address was clean, not black listed anywhere, not on SORBS or other lists. Still, successfully delivering an email was like 50/50, with no way to confirm the other party actually got it.

- you get the vanity email address

- you can switch email providers (including self-hosting later on)

- you can have ~unlimited aliases (depends on the provider)

Most of the setup consists of steps you will have to take anyway when self-hosting (getting a domain, changing DNS records), except for a major amount of headaches that will be taken care of for you.

I have decided that if my VPS provider shuts down, I can just send my outgoing mail through a cloud provider's SMTP gateway. My volume is low enough that it will be free or cost a few cents a month.

Deliverability is not a problem for me, but incoming spam does not have a great solution. Even with rspamd, a lot of crap gets through if you start spamming your email address everywhere.

If you only have one email address, yeah Fastmail or whatever is cheap. But as soon as you want multiple users (family) and throwaway email addresses, it gets expensive in a hurry. But those are free if you self-host.

I also run mail servers for others, mostly non-profit adjacent groups who don’t have the capital to be extorted by cloud service providers.

Sure, there are some things to learn, but like anything – if you do it properly, it’s not hard and can work properly. Never had any deliverability issues over that time (yes, even to the big providers). I also almost never touch the boxes (I do about one architectural overhaul a decade and am working on the next right now).

If you’re willing to invest the time and resources to do it properly, I agree, it works fine.

So I'm doing it now but I'm ready to switch back to one of my Colo servers at any time and I won't be surprised if I have to at some point.

It definitely requires some effort but once you've got it up and running it's pretty hands off. The only issues I've ever had are expiring certs but I've fixed that by configuring auto-renewals and it's all good now.

Ensuring your source IP isn't blacklisted is probably the single most important factor. I had to request a new IP from Linode where my server runs as the one it was originally assigned had a bad reputation.

I use Stalwart as a mail server and it was not too hard to setup (with some caveats to get it working with my SSL certs behind a reverse proxy. But nothing a bit of LLM chatting couldn't solve). All in all, it's not 100% self hosted, but works well.

However, I don't agree with the suggestion in the article to use a self hosted LLM. My mailserver needs a few hundred MBs of RAM at max, but with the spam filter this would increase like 10x-100x.

It is absolutely possible to host, use, and achieve decent deliverability with your own server. It takes work and is a different beast than running a webserver, but that frontier is not dead (yet).

At the same time: it is an ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE IDEA to suggest that folks operate an email server out of residential IP through your ISP. The spam prevention ecosystem is so draconian now that email traffic flowing out of address ranges belonging to residential owners is yeeted into the sun. If you've operated email infrastructure at decently large scales, you know that SPF/DKIM/DMARC are just one part of how spam is identified, and mixing in the source of email traffic into the detection heuristics is a significant part of that identification process. Achieving decent delivery can often involve "warming up" an IP over time to establish its reputation, and consumer address ranges are a hodge-podge of activity that incur very little trust about what they're doing.

I agree with some commenters that exhort the exercise of self-hosting email to prevent the venerable protocol becoming a homogeneous GMail and Outlook-only world, but there are reliable ways to do this: using a VPS, relying on a company for the sending/SMTP part, or something similar. But footguns abound, and disgorging SMTP packets from your LAN edge is one of them.

My reason for self-hosting is control, not privacy: the fact that the cleartext of my outbound emails is visible in the MailPace UI is not a concern; the problem I'm solving is that email providers can delete your account.

[0] https://maddy.email/

[1] https://mailpace.com/

Delivery isn't the problem, just people don't use mail as much as they used to. Most people reach for signal or whatsapp to communicate. Most mail is order confirmations. So don't really care if people can't get mail, it isn't the primary communication tool for most people like it used to me.

> but if your home internet checks these boxes, you can 100% host your own mailserver at home:

    Static IPv4 address (make sure it's not blacklisted)
    Not behind a CGNAT
    Ability to change the PTR record of your IP (usually though the support of your ISP)
    Ability to open common mailserver Ports (25,143,465,587,993)

For normal folks, they are better off using an alternate less privileged email service like email.riamu.io.

It's not worth it.

I wanted to start this discussion because I think we are prime for more self hosted mail servers in 2026 and in the post I explain how to use a locally hosted LLM to nudge the spam detector rspamd to whether or not an incoming mail is spam.

Also in times where the EU can order your mail providers to scan for unwanted content [1] (currently limited to CSAM, later probably more) it does feel better to have your data at your hand.

[1] https://en.philenews.com/international/privacy-to-end-in-the...

Another good guide that uses Debian and its standard packages:

* https://workaround.org/ispmail-trixie

(Updated with every release, and upgrade/migration instructions.)

it's still doable and you get the best feeling there is: Living in the internet.

Can recommend 100%.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton_email_controve...

There was a moment when my son was born and he was in NICU that my mail broke. I just went without for a while. Not ideal.

Since then I've thought: self hosting is nice but hosting cooperatively is probably the best way forward. Democratic control might beat technical control. I'll do it soon, I think: I'd be fascinated to know what people think.

I did test email selfhosting before and there’s a substantial amount of times my emails were never seen by the recipient, sometimes it did cost me good jobs/deals.

So now I use paid email while I control the domain and everything else, so I have the portability feature if I wanted to switch providers without any efforts, but I know now my emails will be delivered whenever I hit sent.

That being said, I self host everything else in my digital life, and I believe everyone should.