> As is so often the case, the people that say you should never do it probably have little relevant experience, they are just repeating something they heard.
More likely, they're saying that 99% of people don't know how to self-host, and for 99% of the rest it's not worth the trouble. Also, if you have to ask, then you shouldn't self-host it.
"If you have to ask, you shouldn't be doing it," said the
tired old King of Gatekeeping.
For a second, I thought I was on Stackoverflow. If you aren't starting by asking questions about the possibilities or limitations of a system you're about to work in, then you aren't starting properly.
I get why it exists, but we also have to be honest with ourselves and admit that there is a massive problem in communicating without assumption of prior knowledge/experience. The tech world is particularly guilty of this, with veterans having forgotten that there was a time when they didn't know what they know, and lacking any patience to adequately help those seeking understanding. To add to the issue, the Internet proper is so noisy with partial or broken information that the task of finding the correct information is far more daunting than it was 20 years ago when I started learning.
We need to give newcomers a break and answer their questions well, and discuss to promote understanding, instead of swatting at them with our canes. The only way knowledge passes to the next generation of thinkers and tinkers is if we fuel that curiousity.
Running an email server, that is secure, is not easy. In the mean time, before you're qualified and know what you're doing, your mail server is a danger to others. From being an open relay through just plain unpatched security vulnerabilities. It's not the consequences for you, it's the consequences your fuckups have for everyone else.
For perspective, some may perceive doing research as being spoon-fed. Sometimes, you don't know where to start and need a hand. At one point, I didn't know how to turn on a computer, and now I'm a software engineer.
The area of 'i barely know how to keep a server running' is a problem for everyone else on the internet as your mail server starts relaying a deluge spam and phishing emails
Asking the question in an open forum is doing the research on it.
I've wanted to do this for a long time, and am using this very HN post as a source of information. I don't expect anyone to set it up for me, but I am hoping to identify the "gotchas" that are likely not discoverable by reading man pages.
People who have been hosting their own email for decades like GP probably built up a solid reputation for their domain and IP before spam filtering became such a kafkaesque business and IPv4 blocks became so fragmented.
If you start self-hosting now, you should be prepared to lose quite a few emails randomly for the first X months while everyone else tries to figure out whether you're legit or not. Though I would encourage anyone who can to try to self-host at least some part of their email infrastructure, even if just for the learning experience, I would also recommend that they avoid using self-hosted email for anything business-critical until they're sure they've got the hang of it.
Tip: Start with a solid SPF, DKIM, DMARC policy and register for microsoft, yahoo, etc.’s admin tools and add your domain to google’s webmaster and postmaster tools. (Yes, even if Google postmaster won’t show you anything yet)
Use mail-tester.com or similar tools to ensure everything is configured correctly.
And then just start sending. As long as your volume grows slowly over the first few months, you’ll get basically no rejects.
Yep, it takes patience and lots of trial and error to build and maintain a reliable email server, unlike an HTTP server or Minecraft server which you can fire up with a script any time you want. Probably explains why so few people do it successfully.
I know about the Google postmaster tools but I'm coming up blank finding anything about Microsoft and Yahoo. Do you (or anyone else) have links to these?
> you should be prepared to lose quite a few emails randomly for the first X months while everyone else tries to figure out whether you're legit or not
And then prepared to lose quite a few emails consistently for the next 10 years when some decide you're not legit.
I'll definitely take that (which is largely under my control) over e.g. Google deciding that I've done something wrong one day and cutting off my email.
I agree with your sentiment, but It's not under your control. It's under the registrar's control. I'd argue registrars are way more prone to social engineering attacks than google is. I also don't use Google as my email provider though.
The choice of registrar is under my control, though.
Also, little-known fact: if you register a UK company (probably more practical if you already have one, but the effort is not actually that big), you can register .uk domains directly with Nominet, the UK registry, by setting yourself up as a self-managed registrar. It doesn't cost anything (beyond the cost of the domain name) and is very easy. I'd love to know if there are any other registries that allow something similar.
> More likely, they're saying that 99% of people don't know how to self-host, and for 99% of the rest it's not worth the trouble.
Certainly way more than 99% of the general population wouldn't know how to self host, but within a techie population like HN, easily ~50% can be capable of doing it if they wanted to. Whether it's worth the effort is a personal decision, but there's a lot of value in owning your own email so I recommend it to anyone who's curious about it and willing to do it.
> Also, if you have to ask, then you shouldn't self-host it.
We should be encouraging curiousity (a HN value) not stomping on it.
If anyone asks, I say go for it. Worst case you'll learn new things, best case now you own your email.
More likely, they're saying that 99% of people don't know how to self-host, and for 99% of the rest it's not worth the trouble. Also, if you have to ask, then you shouldn't self-host it.