Running your own mail server is a PITA but the only way you can really be sure that you don't get fucked like this. It is not for the non-technical and you should have it located ON your personal property in a secured room.
I am finally in the process of rebuilding mine but I am thinking about writing documentation and a tutorial on it for on how to have it local to your home but to pass through a VPS via VPN but still do all of the needful (DKIM, Spam Blocking, Automated Virus scanning, IMAPS, Virtual/Multiple Domains, Webmail interface, At rest encryption, etc)... Maybe even write the ansible to build it using a var's file so its mostly turn-key.
Having a mostly complete deployment would be kind of cool.
Well, I need to document it anyway since the last time I wrote this all up was a long time ago and a lot has changed since then. I am still running my server but it needs a lot of updates so I am rebuilding from scratch and using one of my other sub-domains to do it.
This would be a good opportunity for me to just ansibilize and maybe even terraform (OpenToFu maybe?) it. If it makes it easier for other people then why not?
Running your own mail server is a PITA but the only way you can really be sure that you don't get fucked like this.
They'll still fuck you by blacklisting your server/IP and make you jump through all kinds of hoops just to try to get mail through. I gave up on it years ago and use email as limitedly as I can. It's just too much of a pain in the ass and they know it. That's why they make gmail and other email services the only option for the masses.
I agree, I have had to deal with that at a minimum DOZENS of times even though my IP's have been in good-standing.
At least today its really easy to get a new IP if you want. The downside is that IP's now hold a reputation in email black lists and it can take months if not years to "rehab" an IP if you get it after a scammer/spammer/etc got their hands on it. It makes it pretty hard to deliver email to google/microsoft/etc but you still can receive from those domains since they only do one-way-blocking 99% of the time.
My current IP(s) are in good standing and on a VPS, I would be able to re-use them if I want to while I am "warming up" IP's on a different VPS for a few domains as I switch them over.
As I said before. It is not for the non-technical if you want it to "just work" all of the time. You have to pay attention to it and make sure things are working properly.
I used mailcow to set mine up. It’s not hosted locally though, so it’s reasonably private but it won’t protect me if I somehow draw bad attention to myself.
mailcow is dockerized, so it takes about 4× as much RAM as it should, but it works well and it’s well maintained.
I wish the self hosting community used Ansible instead of Docker to share configurations though.
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