Hello! Are you thinking about hosting your own email? Do you enjoy having a life? Do you want to deal with spf and dkim records? Having to add more storage space? Backing up said emails following the 3-2-1 guide? Finding out your residential ISP blocks port 25?
I didn’t think so, and neither do I. Go pay to have someone else host your email.
Been running my own server for 15 years. I need to put about 20 hours maintenance a year in for updates. I have the whole thing automated as a helm chart using PVCs with cert-manager for auto-renewal and the node just runs k3s as a single node.
That’s a lot of extra layers, but the layer of seperation between the host and the services makes it very easy to automate all the pain away.
20 hours per year is far too many hours of my time, and you’re past the point of having to spend the time architecting it. You also have the operational costs of whatever you decide to host on, along with your backups.
Imo, paying $100 or even $200 a year is a steal in comparison
And if I ever need more storage, I have to plug in a disk?
And If I want to keep my data I actually have to back it up somehow?
And I need to forward a port or if that’s not possible directly though my ISP, use another service that offers it?
Sorry, none of that is much of a revelation.
Sarcasm aside, while hosting your own email is not as easy as a lot of people make it out to be, it is definitely not as hard as you are describing either.
If anything the hardest part is not even in your list, it would probably be getting enough people to mark your domain as not spam to get yourself lifted out of automated spam filtering systems.
Resist! Host your own email!
As someone who hosts a lot of things: Fuck email hosting. Just get your own domain for a few bucks a year, and use an established provider to host it.
Honestly - it’s not impossible. Not as simple as spinning up a webserver, but definitely doable. I should probably write something up at some point.
I can help.
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Hello! Are you thinking about hosting your own email? Do you enjoy having a life? Do you want to deal with spf and dkim records? Having to add more storage space? Backing up said emails following the 3-2-1 guide? Finding out your residential ISP blocks port 25?
I didn’t think so, and neither do I. Go pay to have someone else host your email.
—- END —-
Edit:
Yea, I should definitely write something up so bollocks like this does not proliferate.
Please do.
Be sure to also put how much time people can realistically expect to spend on each step (including offsite backup and recovery).
if it’s more than 10min I’ll just continue to pay tuta mail
Narrator: It is.
Been running my own server for 15 years. I need to put about 20 hours maintenance a year in for updates. I have the whole thing automated as a helm chart using PVCs with cert-manager for auto-renewal and the node just runs k3s as a single node.
That’s a lot of extra layers, but the layer of seperation between the host and the services makes it very easy to automate all the pain away.
20 hours per year is far too many hours of my time, and you’re past the point of having to spend the time architecting it. You also have the operational costs of whatever you decide to host on, along with your backups.
Imo, paying $100 or even $200 a year is a steal in comparison
I pay $300 for 3 years with SSD nodes.
I never have to worry about the company hosting my mail going corrupt, being sold, or being coerced into giving access to my data without just cause.
You undervalue the cost of maintaining the trust with a provider
Agreed.
Too many people undervalue their time.
So what you’re telling me is that…
I have to use DNS for email to work?
And if I ever need more storage, I have to plug in a disk?
And If I want to keep my data I actually have to back it up somehow?
And I need to forward a port or if that’s not possible directly though my ISP, use another service that offers it?
Sorry, none of that is much of a revelation.
Sarcasm aside, while hosting your own email is not as easy as a lot of people make it out to be, it is definitely not as hard as you are describing either.
If anything the hardest part is not even in your list, it would probably be getting enough people to mark your domain as not spam to get yourself lifted out of automated spam filtering systems.
My main issue was getting mailgun to work (it didn’t) and the imap server kept breaking
Or at least get your own domain and use it with a different provider.
Been there… Done that… mailbox.org’ed it…