Reminder that you can go for hybrid approaches; receive email and host IMAP/webmail yourself, and send emails through someone like AWS. I am not saying you can’t do SMTP yourself, but if you want to just dip your toes, it’s an option.

You get many of the advantages; you control your email addresses, you store all of the email and control backups, etc.

…

And another thing: you could also play with https://chatmail.at/relays ; which is pretty cool. I had read about Delta Chat, but decided to play with it recently and… it’s blown my mind.

Yes. Using simple-nixos-mailserver as the foundation.

Really great experience, and have had no deliverability issues.

Email is the hardest thing to self-host, but it’s definitely doable. You’ll need a static IP, and you’ll need to talk to your ISP to make sure outbound connections on port 25 are open.

Set up your servers and your DNS settings (another commenter gave a good guide), then use this tool to check that DKIM and SPF are working and that you’re not seen as spam with SpamAssassin:

https://dkimvalidator.com/

Once that’s done, take your static IP and check it with this tool:

https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx

If it’s on any of the lists, you’ll need to go to those lists’ sites and try to get it removed. You might need to make an email address for “postmaster@yourdomain” at this point.

Beyond that, you may need to “warm up” your IP address, by sending email to yourself on various services (Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft) and marking them as not spam.

Then you should be golden.

I had to do this for both my SMTP servers for Port87. If you use more than one server, this process gets a little harder, so probably stick to one at first.

I do it. Postfix+dovecot+spamassassin managed with ISPConfig running on a VPS. Works just fine, but my domains already have a long-ish good reputation so that may play a part on my experience. Biggest headache is to keep things running, which occasionally means jumping trough hoops microsoft(mostly) and others throw at you by flagging your server as spam for no apparent reason.

I am not OP but I love the idea of selhosting email. This is stopping me though:

… set it up correctly with a healthy IP address and domain (not blacklisted)

Any tips on how to accomplish this?

I’ve been hosting my own email servers for 20 years without issue. But email systems were a huge part of my IT career so it was easy.

It works great if you have static IPs and know what you’re doing in terms of following best practices. If you’re missing those two things you’re going to have a bad time.

If you have the statics and want to learn, I’d recommend purchasing a test domain and getting the kinks worked out before you move a domain you care about to your own system.

As someone who tried to self-host it like a month ago (and seemingly still hasn’t got it fully working), I’ll just write out the overview of what I’ve done and let you (and others) comment on how correct and feasible it is.

Since my ISP doesn’t allow me to get a static IP address, I rented a VPS connection and made a wireguard tunnel from the VPS to my computer. This tunnel forwards traffic at all the necessary ports between the two machines. I really wasn’t familiar with all the necessary components for an entire mail server, so I chose mailcow since it packages everything into one single software (well, more like a bunch of docker containers). Another reason I went with mailcow was that I could easily find a github tutorial for how to set up mailcow with wireguard tunneling (it’s a bit outdated IMO, but the changes are minor). Mailcow also gives a nice portal interface listing out all the DNS entries you need to put in place to get it working perfectly.

In the end, I still see a few incoming emails getting dropped and reception time being an hour or so, and I’m not sure if it’s a problem with my tunnel or DNS or something else. But overall, I’d say it was much easier than setting up all the individual services myself.

I use YUNOhost on a VPS and it came with email out of the box. Which is just as well because I had no previous experience self-hosting!

I think I had a couple of emails get marked as spam in the beginning but everything has been totally fine for the last 2/3 years.

I recently set up the whole stack (Postfix, Dovecot, OpenDKIM) on a VPS. I wanted to do it from home, but my ISP won’t provide a static IP or open ports 25/465/587 for consumer customers, no exceptions.

It took me about two days to get everything working, but most of that was because I went in with very little knowledge of how email even actually works. If you’re looking for a learning experience, I’d say go for it. If you just want a working email setup quickly, I wouldn’t recommend it.

I haven’t noticed any deliverability issues so far. Just make sure you have SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and PTR records all set correctly from the start.

I was actually recently discussing self-hosting email on Matrix a while ago, so I’ll just copy-paste below. Long story short, find the right existing email software you want to use, set it up correctly with a healthy IP address and domain (not blacklisted), the right DNS entries, and a PTR record, and it’ll work just fine.

Honestly, I haven’t had any issues with self-hosting email, and I’ve been doing it for the past 2 years. I think the trick is that you just need to set everything up correctly and then verify your setup with mail-tester.com to ensure all the headers, DNS entries, etc. are correct. There are some great projects that make it extremely easy to self-host, including Mailu github.com/mailu/mailu, Mailcow github.com/mailcow/mailcow-dockerized, Docker mailserver (https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver), Stalwart github.com/stalwartlabs/stalwart, and I’m sure more. I’m currently using Mailu, but I have been eyeing Stalwart, which has recently gotten quite popular and implements modern email protocols and does everything in Rust.

If I were you and just wanted to take a stab at self-hosting email, I would start with Stalwart and see how you like it. The only caveat is that it doesn’t yet come with a webmail client, so if you wanted one, you’d have to separately add that to your setup.

Something you would need to think about though is your IP address. It must be static, and it should be in a healthy IP address range (not on any popular blacklists). You also need to be able to set up rDNS (reverse DNS) / PTR record, so you can point your IP address back to your email domain.

I did mailinabox for a bit. Worked well but spam made me stop.

I would recommend something like stalwart, which is just a single binary and works. Gives you a web interface and a zonefile you can just copy paste into your DNS including all correct DMARC DKIM SPF and autodiscovery records.

Setting postfix, dovecot etc. up from scratch can be a bit time consuming and annoying.

Deliverability depends on where it is hosted, many VPC providers IP space is completely blocked in spam filters.

Yes I do host my email myself since tens of years.

No I do not self-host it at home

See here https://wiki.gardiol.org/doku.php?id=email%3Astart (disclaimer: my wiki)

Yes. Just today. And every day of the last 26 years. GMail delivery is no big deal. but outlook freaks out in ways I just don’t care to solve.

I have been self-hosting my mail server for the past 5 or 6 years with success. Recently my ISP decided to close port 25 so I have to use a third party to deliver my outgoing mail.