koldfront

Running a mail server #email

🕐︎ - 2021-12-25

When I see articles like "Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one" make their rounds on lobste.rs and Hacker News, I'm always a little baffled.

I have been running my own email server since some time in the late 1990s and although there has been changes over the years, from adding greylisting to TLS, adding my own tiny backup MX's, DKIM, DMARC and MTA-STS, it has not been a lot of work or that much of a hassle - and when something goes wrong I can actually check a log file myself.

I think if you can, you should host your own email server - if nothing else to do your own little part in keeping up the diversity and distributed nature of the internet.

Postfix, Dovecot, sqlgrey, Lets Encrypt, OpenDKIM, OpenDMARC are all readily available in Free/Open Source Operating Systems, such as Debian. The various parts do take some configuration, but it's not that arcane (compared to mastering Sendmail back in the day). There are even people who made recipes to easily set up a mail server: So You Want To Run Your Own Mail Server…

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