[HN Gopher] Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server
___________________________________________________________________
Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 281 points
Date : 2021-06-19 03:41 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (maddy.email)
(TXT) w3m dump (maddy.email)
| kijin wrote:
| Is the name meant to imply that this is the mail server
| equivalent of caddy?
|
| [edit] I found the FAQ:
|
| > It was intended to be one but developers quickly acknowledged
| the fact email cannot be easily abstracted behind some magic.
|
| So it can't be as simple as caddy, but they're doing their best.
| :)
| whalesalad wrote:
| I remember building my own mail server on a PIII with 500mhz and
| 128mb of ram. I used qmailrocks.org and learned so much about
| Linux and how things work. This was in like 2003 or 2004? My how
| times have changed!
| sergiomattei wrote:
| This is a great initiative. The last time I remember setting up a
| mail server using Postfix or Dovecot was around 2015.
|
| It was a traumatizing experience. It rarely worked, all my email
| went to spam and I absolutely hated the amount of hackery and
| duct tape required to keep it working. Configuration files,
| missed emails...
|
| It was so unpleasant, to this day I avoid messing with mail on
| servers at all costs. I'd much rather pay for Mailgun or some
| provider.
|
| Lately I've been seeing an uptick of these apps making self-
| hosted email easier. Mail in a box, Maddy, etc. I will
| unconditionally support anything that makes doing this easier.
|
| I'm not switching from GSuite, but I'm happy to see progress in
| the space.
| AgoRapide wrote:
| I had great fun setting up Postfix and Dovecot recently.
|
| However, I was very specific with always going for the minimum
| most simple solution. I do not have a dedicated database for
| instance, but use just mbox and POP3.
|
| And I did not even bother much with anti-spam, I chose a super
| easy filter in Thunderbird instead, sending everything with
| 'unknown' in Received: header to the Thrash folder.
|
| Getting accepted by others was also not much of an issue (but
| lots of details of course, PTR, SPF, DKIM, DMARC).
|
| More details here if anyone is interested:
|
| http://bef.no/DitchingWindowsAndAWS/
| Grimm665 wrote:
| I also hated the headache of Postfix so I switched to OpenSMTPD
| on OpenBSD and it is so so much nicer. It feels much more set-
| and-forget than any other time I've tried running mail servers
| on Linux.
| n3storm wrote:
| Your mail will go to Spam too with Maddy, this is not about the
| MTA.
| g_p wrote:
| One "weird trick" I discovered with deliverability was that
| plaintext email from my server was rejected, but HTML email
| from it was accepted.
|
| For anyone with deliverability issues and mail going to spam,
| it might be worth trying this out (after you have sorted all
| the usual points like DKIM, SPF, PTR record etc.) - this
| obviously only helps if your IP is clean. I was surprised
| though, and only discovered it by accident.
|
| I had good deliverability to Google hosted mail, but not to
| Microsoft 365. I even had issues with deliverability doing
| 365 to 365, until I sent HTML mail.
| hawski wrote:
| What a world we live in, I always would thought the
| opposite. Probably it was like that before, but now maybe
| spammers send more plain text e-mails to appear legit.
| Never ending game of cat and mouse.
| g_p wrote:
| My guess (pure speculation) is that more spam is auto-
| generated via email libraries and similar, and that is
| producing plaintext mail to try to simplify what it's
| getting through the filters.
|
| On the other hand, most human-generated mail is HTML-
| based, as it's written in a web-client or desktop/mobile
| "app client", that is using HTML to let people do bold
| and put pictures into their email.
|
| I was as surprised as you when I figured this out!
| dhess wrote:
| As someone who has run his own mail servers since 2000, and
| _still_ gets his email delivered to people 's spam folders
| (even when I've emailed them in the past, or simply replied
| to their original message), this is very interesting, as I
| always enable plaintext outbound email.
|
| I'll have to give this a try. Thanks for the tip!
| g_p wrote:
| Your symptoms sound exactly like the issues I was having
| - everything was "right" (in theory) - emails were
| leaving on the right IPv4, that had the correct PTR, etc
| etc. I just couldn't figure out what was wrong.
|
| It was the same issue - even replies to existing threads
| had the issue. What got me looking into it more closely
| was that I had no issues delivering to G Suite tenants;
| it was only issues with 365 tenants.
|
| I wonder if there's a non-trivial correlation between
| people choosing to genuinely self-host their own mail,
| and those who use plaintext outbound mail by default (and
| know what that means).
| upofadown wrote:
| That's odd. I know that Spamassassin actually penalizes
| HTML and HTML only email.
|
| Are you sure there is not some sort of parasitic Bayes
| filtering happening here?
| g_p wrote:
| It's very odd. I don't know how Microsoft implements
| their own server-side spam filtering, but the issue was
| coming from their filters. No issues with any other host.
| G Suite accounts received plaintext mail fine.
|
| I never found much by way of technical detail on 365
| deliverability, beyond the usual DKIM/SPF/DMARC/PTR
| record guidance, and forms for getting yourself removed
| from the whitelist.
|
| What's especially strange is that this issue applied even
| when sending mail as a 365 subscriber. Once there was
| HTML content present in the email, deliverability (to
| other separate 365 tenants) improved!
|
| Very odd...
| reitanuki wrote:
| This is not (always) true.
|
| Maddy comes with a lot of the 'good stuff' like DKIM and
| DMARC ready to be used, whereas setting that up yourself with
| Postfix was a pain (from my experience a few years ago) and
| probably meant you didn't bother.
|
| I've had better deliverability, especially to Gmail and
| Microsoft, since using Maddy, probably for this reason.
|
| Now, of course, I must admit that self-hosted e-mail seems
| like it will always inevitably run into a blocklist problem,
| usually because of IP neighbours. But personally, I've
| managed to avoid that in the last year that I've been running
| Maddy -- main exception is I had to fill in Microsoft's silly
| form to get unblocked at the start (but I've had to do this
| for every deployment I've ever done).
| n3storm wrote:
| So you agree is not about the software but you did not
| implement best practices with Postfix. Also, whenever you
| give an address to someone else, family or friend, risk of
| going to spam increases. Links or src in emails without
| https, higher risk, Does Maudy prevent you from doing that?
| viraptor wrote:
| If one software makes best practices easy to implement
| and another makes them hard, it still is about software.
| Not entirely, but it's important.
| foxcpp wrote:
| It is definitely possible to configure something like
| rspamd to scan outbound messages.
| patrakov wrote:
| And your sales people will call this a misconfiguration
| serious enough to fire the sysadmin who did this. The
| problem is that, typically, nobody trains or supervises
| the filter applied to the outgoing mail, and nobody is
| warned that it did, in fact, reject an email, and there
| is no manual override if the filter is, in fact, wrong.
| And spammers (from the viewpoint of a particular
| organization) don't exist and can't exist inside the
| organization, so any rejected outgoing email is, by
| definition, a false positive.
|
| Well, viruses are the exception.
| bluedino wrote:
| How would you compare it to a non-trivial Apache or NGINX
| install? What about configuring an environment for Rails or
| Docker or...?
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _Lately I 've been seeing an uptick of these apps making
| self-hosted email easier. Mail in a box, Maddy, etc. I will
| unconditionally support anything that makes doing this easier._
|
| See also ISPmail (which uses Debian):
|
| * https://workaround.org/ispmail
| miedpo wrote:
| I haven't tried Maddy (I'm sure it's quite good), but I do use
| Cloudron right now and it's a breeze to manage email in it.
| lazyweb wrote:
| I've been running my own selfhosted mail server setup for about
| six years [1] without much trouble. It's a lot of work in the
| beginning, and there is a learning curve, but I've never
| experienced any of the issues lots of other people seem to have
| with their setups.
|
| [1] https://jschumacher.info/2021/05/running-a-private-mail-
| serv...
| zertrin wrote:
| Same experience here, used the workaround.org tutorial as
| strong inspiration (not blindly copy pasting, but to serve as
| guided path to follow and learn).
|
| Steep learning curve indeed, but after initial setup it's just
| working and necessitate no tending except when I do major
| upgrades (of Debian so every 2.5 years on average), in case
| some config needs updating.
|
| But this is really a private email server with no users except
| me, thus probably not encountering the issues related to mail
| servers with many users that might or might not have a good
| email hygiene.
| NonEUCitizen wrote:
| How complete is the IMAP4 support?
| foxcpp wrote:
| IMAP4rev1 is fully and almost [1] correctly implemented. There
| are some useful protocol extensions supported but some other
| important ones are missing (e.g. CONDSTORE).
|
| There are no known issues with popular clients but performance
| may be a bit rough. Both due to missing extensions and storage
| implementation quality e.g. SEARCH may get slow for large
| inboxes.
|
| [1] https://github.com/foxcpp/maddy/issues/188
| lorisdev wrote:
| I've been using simple mail forwarder
| (https://github.com/huan/docker-simple-mail-forwarder) for a
| while now to catch-all and forward any email to my domain to my
| personal email on protonmail. Advantages are that I can move to
| another email provider without much hassle, and that I can have a
| different email address for any service I sign up for. The main
| disadvantage is that I can't make it look like I am replying from
| the same address. I wonder if it's something that's doable?
| fragileone wrote:
| AnonAddy can do this and it has a nice web GUI. It also allows
| you to individually block any of the email addresses from
| forwarding to your inbox, which helps make spam control much
| easier.
| figbert wrote:
| I've been using Maddy now for about a month for my email, and
| it's incredible. The dev says it's not caddy for email - but in
| my experience, it's certainly been that easy.
|
| I've got to write a longer article about this, but self-hosting
| email is incredibly liberating. I now own my entire digital
| identity. I can work on open source projects with developers
| around the world completely while relying only on my own
| capabilities.
| ta1234567890 wrote:
| What hosting service do you recommend to run it on?
| figbert wrote:
| I use Hetzner, personally.
|
| Did a bit of a cost analysis here:
| https://figbert.com/posts/moving-to-hetzner-from-
| digitalocea...
| foxcpp wrote:
| Some parts of Hetzner IP space are in blacklists. It is a
| bit of a lottery here. Be sure to check IP you got.
| 3np wrote:
| Vultr, Linode, Njalla, Hetzner, Scaleway
| spuz wrote:
| Have you actually hosted an email server on all five of
| those? As you mentioned in your other comment, it can be
| very helpful if your VPS provider is able to respond to
| support requests asking Microsoft for IP addresses to be
| whitelisted. I can't imagine all VPS providers would be so
| helpful but you didn't mention which one you were using in
| that comment.
| xarope wrote:
| I'm hosting on linode, and once I had my SPF & DKIM
| records setup, things went a lot smoother.
| lifty wrote:
| I'm hosting my email on Scaleway for 4-5 years and have
| no issues with deliverability. Last time I checked my
| email server was correctly configured.
| eps wrote:
| Don't know about others, but Linode and Hetzner have parts
| of their IP space on spamming blacklists. As does Digital
| Ocean. So it's a lottery, basically.
| cfn wrote:
| Maybe it helps to host the email server in a less known and
| maybe a bit more expensive ISP. I have been self hosting my
| company's emails for 10+ years and even changed IPs halfway
| (VPS migration). I vaguely remember having to setup DKIM and
| such when that became a things and never got any
| deliverability problems since (fingers crossed).
| aetherspawn wrote:
| How did you get around deliverability issues?
| figbert wrote:
| I have literally never (to my knowledge) been rejected by one
| of the big boys (i.e. gmail or outlook). Was quite nervous
| about it in the beginning, but I haven't run into any issues.
|
| I have had a number of bumps: 1. In
| exchanging emails with someone with a custom domain, I found
| there SPF record was broken and thus my server was rejecting
| their emails. I've weakened my policy and now their mail goes
| to my Junk, which I then manually move to my inbox because
| I'm lazy and don't want to set up a custom rule.
| 2. I wanted to subscribe to the Tarnsap mailing list, and had
| to decrease the minimum TLS level for outgoing mail to
| "none." Dr. Percival believes TLS on SMTP is "silly" (which,
| in the sense that all email is insecure, is true, but in the
| sense that email with modern security measures is better than
| nothing, is in itself a "silly" opinion). 3. I
| had some server downtime recently
| (https://figbert.com/posts/wrong-way-to-switch-server-os/)
| and couldn't receive emails, which sucked. But that was on
| me.
|
| I highly recommend giving it a go!
| zie wrote:
| Just to defend Dr. Percival a little here(since I have the
| same stance, though we do also support TLS), the RFC's
| require you to support non-encrypted SMTP. Since you HAVE
| to support it(not only per RFC but because in the real
| world so many SMTP communicators are stupid, lazy, or
| ignorant), there is little point in trying to make email
| secure. Until such time as everyone decides TLS1.3+ is
| required for SMTP, there is no hope, so why bother.
|
| Our external auditors get all upset about it every single
| year, and every single year, I show them the RFC's and they
| then shutup about it for a year. If you feel strongly
| enough about it, try to get a RFC passed where SMTP
| requires TLS now.
| zie wrote:
| I don't run Maddy, but I do run email for an organization of
| a few thousand people. It happens on occasion from various
| providers, The larger organizations(MS,Google,etc) will spam
| your logs SMTP errors with a URL. You visit the URL and do
| whatever actions they want that particular day and life goes
| on. It's not hard, but it is a bit annoying sometimes.
|
| Generally if you have a static IP and you don't go being all
| stupid with spam, it's not THAT difficult, but you do have to
| jump a few hoops and then occasionally play wackamole with
| their spam prevention junk for the month.
|
| It seems to come in waves, like email will be fine for a few
| months and then 1 provider after another will be all upset
| about gosh knows what that day and you have to visit URL's
| and push a few buttons.
|
| I've been to lazy to track it, and the various reasons for
| that particular day, but this has been my experience. A few
| times a year you have to go babysit SMTP so email can be
| delivered again.
| 3np wrote:
| From someone else with similar experience: I've been
| following all best practices to the best of my abilities
| (rDNS/DMARC/DKIM/SPF/etc). After all that was properly in
| place, the only problematic receiver was Microsoft
| (outlook.com/hotmail.com/live.com), which bounced and
| provided an appeal process.
|
| I filled the form, was requested documentation from my ISP on
| the IP address.
|
| I asked my VPS hosting company (since they provide the public
| IP and therefore act as ISP) and they proactively reached out
| to Microsoft, who lifted the restriction after that.
|
| So since then no delivery issues. YMMV.
|
| If you intend to host this from your residential address, it
| can be a good idea to tunnel external traffic over VPN
| through a VPS or similar. Not only for privacy reasons, but
| also to get around ISP blocks and IP banlists. I don't know
| how flexible maddy is, but in postfix in case the above
| scenario wouldn't be resolved, I could have set to use
| mailgun/mailroute for MS domains only and relay like normally
| for others.
| kureikain wrote:
| Do you also have any issue with icloud? I somehow get bad
| IP range and never been able to have them whitelist me, re-
| attempting seems just put put me into a blackhole queue
| support on their team :(
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| i have been using mailinabox on a vps server and all the
| major email tests say the mailbox is fine. only gmail
| treats my emails as spam. others just work fine. i don't
| know what to do other than having to call receipients and
| ask them to unspam the mail. That doesnt seem to "train"
| their spam filters so don't know
| aetherspawn wrote:
| What do you use as a mail client (on desktop and on
| phones), and do you have a solution for server side
| signatures? If so, how well have you found that it supports
| Reply and Forwarding insertion? Does it support embedding
| signature logos as hidden attachments to workaround blocked
| images?
| cameronh90 wrote:
| Regarding the Microsoft issues, what form did you use? I
| tried one but they never got back to me..
| g_p wrote:
| To share one trick I found (after you've done all the
| DKIM/SPF/DMARC/PTR things others point out), if you still
| have deliverability issues to Microsoft 365 tenants, it is
| worth sending mail as HTML rather than plain text.
|
| I have no idea why that helps (well, I could guess that some
| spam heuristic thinks plaintext email without an accompanying
| HTML envelope is more likely to be spam), but changing this
| took me from near-constant "your email went to spam" to no
| issues sending even things that actually look spammy (i.e. an
| email just containing a link that might be of interest to the
| recipient)
| dheera wrote:
| Is there some sort of web interface for self-hosted e-mail that
| is reasonably good and sleek/modern-looking like Gmail, and
| also works well on mobile with swipe gestures and everything?
| lightspot21 wrote:
| The new Roundcube is pretty good these days
| 3np wrote:
| I imagine this comes down to personal preference a lot, but I
| strongly prefer Roundcube over Gmail. They have improved a
| lot over the past years, if you have some preconceptions.
| After 10y+ on Gmail I finally feel like I am getting a grasp
| over my own email.
|
| But then I also very much prefer a hierarchical/directory
| tree approach to organizing e-mail than labels&search as
| Gmail does it.
|
| More similar UX-philosophy can be found in Mailpile[1] and
| Cypht[2]. Both still have decent amount of moving parts but
| are continuously progressing.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/roundcube/roundcubemail/
|
| [1]: https://github.com/mailpile/Mailpile
|
| [2]: https://cypht.org/
| figbert wrote:
| I try and use native clients or TUIs rather than webmail. I'm
| current using Mail.app and aerc and having a blast.
| alephu5 wrote:
| I use mailcow and it uses SoGo which is quite pleasant in my
| opinion https://www.sogo.nu/
| kureikain wrote:
| You can try https://www.rainloop.net/try-now/ they are pretty
| good with a slick UI. I would call it modern Roundcoube
| majkinetor wrote:
| Zimbra
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| I use nearlyfreespeech to host my personal website, but they
| don't allow for email hosting. What other similar host (cheap but
| reliable) would you recommend for hosting an email server like
| Maddy?
| zimpenfish wrote:
| I'd love to move my crufty mail setup to something like this but
| after 15 years of self-hosting, there are many wrinkles and
| dragons that people rely on (e.g. rspamd whitelist from iOS
| notes, IMAP authentication and proxying via Perl+sqlite) which
| these pre-packaged solutions don't (and probably rightly!)
| support.
|
| But if I was setting up something new, I'd definitely use one.
| KronisLV wrote:
| Personally i use a mail server that's preconfigured and lives
| inside of a Docker container with all of the dependencies that it
| needs: https://hub.docker.com/r/mailserver/docker-mailserver (
| GitHub: https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver ).
| With it, adding a new e-mail account is as simple as running a
| script with some parameters and it interoperates nicely with most
| clients such as Thunderbird or even the one built into Nextcloud
| (for a lightweight hosted solution without a separate app to
| manage).
|
| It is pretty awesome to see new projects that try to improve the
| user experience for the system admins, for example, the Caddy web
| server and now the Maddy mail server. I'm not sure whether i'd
| have been able to set up a mail server the "old fashioned way",
| seemingly in line with the concerns of the other people here who
| have tried that more extensively. Somehow, while e-mail is super
| widespread and works decently for getting text information from
| place A to place B, it also feels a tad overcomplicated (the
| different components for sending/receiving mail, SMTP, IMAP,
| POP3, the sad need for anti virus scanning, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, the
| similarly sad need for anti spam protection).
|
| That said, the containerized solution above has also worked
| nicely for me - i'll still probably use GMail/other hosted
| solutions for personal e-mail stuff and communication, but right
| now i've already switched over to using my own mail server for
| all of the automated e-mails that i need, such as from SonarQube
| and Zabbix, as well as GitLab.
| sleavey wrote:
| I tried it recently and was irritated that it doesn't play
| nicely with a existing LetsEncrypt instance on the host. Docker
| doesn't like mounting symlinks, and LetsEncrypt uses symlinks
| to point to the latest live certificate and key. I could
| configure Certbot (LetsEncrypt) on deployment of a new
| certificate to copy it to the Docker instance and tell it to
| load it, but at this point I just fished out my old Postfix and
| Dovecot configurations and notes and did it myself; at least
| this way I'm in complete control.
|
| I do approve of such a project existing though, and if I wasn't
| running other things on the host I would probably use it.
| Firerouge wrote:
| Configuration and setup wise, this looks somewhat simpler to
| setup than the comparable mailcow-dockerized.
| https://mailcow.github.io/mailcow-dockerized-docs/i_u_m_inst...
|
| I wonder how it compares in multi account management and spam,
| phishing, & virus blocking, is it extensible?
| foxcpp wrote:
| Spam, phishing, virus blocking - no builtin measures. It is
| easy to integrate rspamd (literally adding one line into
| config). ClamAV can be used via clamav-milter though some
| configuration is needed - no direct & easy integration for now.
|
| maddy implements de-facto standard milter protocol so it is
| possible to use any third-party filtering software supporting
| it.
| andix wrote:
| Mailcow is a great system. I use it and I love it.
|
| But it's a total mess. So many different components glued
| together, so much that can go wrong. The configuration is
| scattered into hundreds of files. There is no clear split
| between the product and user-configuration. To change some
| settings, you need to make adjustments in the core product (the
| config files that hold everything together).
|
| Replacing a lot of components with Maddy would probably make
| projects like mailcow way slimmer.
| fffrantz wrote:
| I've been using YunoHost (https://yunohost.org/) for my VPS setup
| for years, including emails, and the setup is such a breeze. It
| takes care of everything from certs to spam detection, includes
| IMAP, and you can even choose you webmail interface. Maddy sure
| looks like a great alternative if you just want/need emails.
|
| Edit : typo
| kowlo wrote:
| I hit `esc` on that page (no idea why) and it looks like a cool
| way to modify the content (or send a request to). It did
| confuse me for a moment!
| mehdix wrote:
| fwiw, I'm using postfix, dovecot and rspamd for a year now and it
| is working like charm ever since. However, gmx.de rejected emails
| due to reverse dns issues.
| the_duke wrote:
| I've been using maddy as a personal and business email server for
| a while.
|
| Resource consumption is basically zero, no problems with sending
| or receiving emails at all.
|
| It did take me quite a few hours to properly set up a Kubernetes
| + Terraform config though. Getting all the bits and pieces for
| DKIM, SPF, DMARC right, including issuing certs via cert-manager,
| is quite finicky.
| rdevsrex wrote:
| This is exactly the kind of thing that I've been planning to make
| for my own personal use. I'll definitely check it out!
| lifty wrote:
| You can put it together in a weekend.
| postmanpat wrote:
| I used to run my own mail, but gave up due to the risk of me
| screwing up backups/restoration.
|
| Maddy (sqlite) + https://litestream.io/ might be simple enough to
| get right.
| boardwaalk wrote:
| Mail is one of the easier things to backup IMO. It's just a
| directory if you use Maildir. Just tar it up with other
| important stuff on your filesystem you probably also want to
| save. No need for fancy "streaming SQLite replication."
| postmanpat wrote:
| I recall Litestream citing a ~3s streaming replication lag.
|
| What replication lag could tar-on-a-cronjob reasonably
| achieve for a moderate 5GB mail store?
|
| Even tar'ing isn't trivial: I've seen casing of people having
| missed preserving file permissions, making restoration
| difficult.
| benbjohnson wrote:
| Litestream author here. It has a 1s replication lag by
| default. It will snapshot the whole database periodically
| but otherwise it only incrementally uploads the new WAL
| pages (which are LZ4 compressed).
| creshal wrote:
| Replication and backups are usually different things. If
| you need replication, yes, backup tools won't cut it
| latency wise.
|
| But proper backup tools like rsnapshot, borg, etc. pp. have
| no trouble correctly backing up email servers even at 10 or
| 100 times your mail store size.
| bombcar wrote:
| At 5G size you could do something with ZFS and tons of
| snapshots and zfs send.
| creshal wrote:
| Depends on how much latency/what big a time window for
| data loss between runs you can afford. We went from
| streaming cyrus-imapd replication to minutely
| send/receive for availability, but that introduces a
| 30-90 time window where data can be lost. Fine for us
| (esp. considering the reduction in ops overhead), but not
| necessarily for everyone.
|
| (Backups are done by rsnapshot pulling from a snapshot,
| so we have another copy outside ZFS just in case.)
| jraph wrote:
| I'd go with rsync for the transfer (+ zfs/btrfs snapshots
| on the receiving side to keep incremental backups)
| 3np wrote:
| Two popular alternatives for this:
|
| https://github.com/zrepl/zrepl
|
| https://github.com/jimsalterjrs/sanoid/
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| Unrelated but: what VPS hosts are reliable for email? I've had
| trouble with Linode being blocked in the past. I'm aware Google
| Cloud blocks port 25. I haven't tried EC2 but I assume the worst.
| danmur wrote:
| This doesn't answer your question, but I gave up on hosting my
| own email. I host my own other stuff where I can but email is
| just too much of a pain; constant delivery problems (especially
| to MS), spam is a pain to keep up with etc.
| andyana wrote:
| You can run your own stuff and use a commercial relay like
| Sendinblue to handle delivery for you. Best of both worlds,
| in my opinion.
| KronisLV wrote:
| Currently using Time4VPS with no issues so far:
| https://www.time4vps.com/?affid=5294 (affiliate link,
| personally i find it to be an affordable VPS host that i've
| used for years and host most of my stuff on).
|
| However, i'd say that it's less of a matter of choosing a VPS
| host and more one of making sure that the IP addresses that you
| get are not in any blacklists. This seems like a good starting
| point for those sorts of checks: https://dnschecker.org/ip-
| blacklist-checker.php Or maybe this:
| https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx
|
| I think the actual question would be: "Which VPS hosts have the
| least blacklisted IP addresses for hosting mail servers?" But
| i'm afraid that i cannot answer that one, because after a brief
| search i could not find any articles, which would check the IP
| blocks owned by different hosts and what percentage of them are
| in blacklists, which would probably be a large undertaking.
|
| Until then, most of the answers will probably be subjective,
| along the lines of: "I use $HOST without many problems." (like
| my answer above, though even then someone could get a
| blacklisted IP address and their answer would be the exact
| opposite to mine).
| papaf wrote:
| _what VPS hosts are reliable for email?_
|
| I've not had problems with Hetzner and Scaleway. Before that I
| used to host email on random vendors I saw on Low End Box[1]
| and never had problems.
|
| [1] https://lowendbox.com/
| sildur wrote:
| I got good results with Hetzner. But it takes some time to set
| up a server that complies with all of Google requirements.
| Also, I once inherited a spammy IP address and took me some
| time to remove it from spam databases.
| calpaterson wrote:
| What google requirements are you referring to? SPF/DKIM/etc?
| papaf wrote:
| Thats a good point about IP addresses.
|
| I think the advantage with Hetzner cloud is that you rent the
| IP address separately. If you get an IP with a bad reputation
| you can stop renting it and get a new one.
|
| Edit: I have not actually tried changing the IP, its just an
| idea. Also, I hope the spammers don't start doing this and
| spoil it for everyone else.
| AgoRapide wrote:
| Hetzner does not open port 25 outbound (SMTP) until you
| have paid your first invoice. I therefore believe them to
| handle this problem somewhat seriously.
| 3np wrote:
| VPS providers generally (don't know about GCP) lift port
| restrictions if you write them and request it explicitly.
|
| At least Vultr and Linode will also communicate with other big
| providers (e.g. Gmail or Outlook.com) in case you have delivery
| issues due to history of the IP addressor subnet before you
| took it over.
| tomcooks wrote:
| Any host, just check that the IP they provide you with is not
| blacklisted on spamlists, otherwise you're going to have a hard
| time
| shankspeaks wrote:
| I've run mail servers on EC2 before. You'll need to raise a
| request to remove the SMTP 25 restriction (both inbound and
| outbound), and also apply for a DNS reverse ptr update for that
| IP for it to work.
| AgoRapide wrote:
| I just switched from EC2 to Hetzner. I found Hetzner's
| approach much more customer friendly, you set up PTR yourself
| for instance.
| grp000 wrote:
| Hey, if you've used AWS SES before, how would you think the
| two compare?
| andix wrote:
| I used to run CommuniGate from Stalker on my private mail server.
|
| It is more or less one binary and one data folder, available for
| all operating systems, providing a lot of functionality (SMTP,
| IMAP, ActiveSync, Webmail, Groupware, ...). Everything can be
| configured via one uniform Web UI. Multi domain, multi IP, and
| you could even cluster together multiple servers.
|
| It's closed source, but offers a free license for up to 5
| mailboxes.
|
| Sadly this product died during the last 10 years and is now in an
| unusable state.
| skyfaller wrote:
| My one question: Caddy is known for effortless TLS, has it on by
| default and makes it "just work". Why can't Maddy also
| automatically set up TLS, instead of having to use a cert
| acquired by some other means?
| hardwaresofton wrote:
| Maddy is fantastic -- for greater flexibility/ease of deployment,
| you can pre-provision your DKIM keys as well. Maddy also works
| wonderfully when combined with other technologies, it's nice,
| simple and light.
|
| It works great with Haraka[0] on the outside proxying email to
| maddy instances on the inside. I've also combined it with SES
| provisioned with Pulumi + k8s[1] (for those on AWS), which is a
| little bit more involved but is what I use on projects now.
|
| Another entry in this space is chasquid[2] but I've only used/can
| recommend maddy. Maddy is so good it makes me think anyone could
| run a hard-multitenant email provider with ease (I'm essentially
| doing that for each of my projects).
|
| [0]: https://haraka.github.io
|
| [1]: https://www.vadosware.io/post/setting-up-ses-with-pulumi/
|
| [2]: https://github.com/albertito/chasquid
| dusted wrote:
| I'm running a Postfix, Dovecot, OpenDKIM, OpenSPF stack, and it's
| not entirely trivial to setup and get working.. Next time, I'll
| try this, if I remember.. Next big issue is how difficult it is
| to actually get to send email from your email server when you're
| really self hosting it (as in, on a box in your actual home, like
| it's supposed to be)
| xarope wrote:
| Ditto for me (postfix, dovecot, opendkim, spf etc), took me
| about 3 months to get it working, and for the last 6+ years I
| haven't dared to touch my postfix configuration!
|
| I am severely tempted to give maddy a try now...!
| tathatsnice wrote:
| Is catch-all supported? Couldn't find an answer to that in the
| FAQ.
| figbert wrote:
| Yes! You just have to get it set up properly in the config (I
| remember reading about it in the docs or mailing list
| somewhere).
| foxcpp wrote:
| https://github.com/foxcpp/maddy/issues/243#issuecomment-6556...
|
| I guess that needs to be in FAQ...
| tommasoamici wrote:
| I see no one has mentioned Mailu (https://mailu.io/1.7/). It's a
| self hosted mail server made up of a couple docker images.
|
| I would recommend it based on my use and experience.
|
| I've been using it for my personal email and for automated no-
| reply messages in a few projects with no delivery issues. I'm
| hosting on a Contabo VPS.
|
| It handles spam with rspamd, sets you up with DMARC, DKIM, has an
| admin interface, web mail interface.
| mattbee wrote:
| Seconded, I've used it for a couple of years and it's a great
| package that I find quite understandable (a docker-compose
| stack).
| neals wrote:
| What keeps me from running my own like this is stuff like, how
| easy would migration to another sever be and how easy is backup
| and recover.
| fragileone wrote:
| Docker is pretty portable by design. If you use bind mounts
| you can just scp the docker-conpose.yml and your bind mount
| volumes to your new server and you're done. If using Docker-
| managed volumes you'll need to docker cp the data out of them
| first before scp, then docker cp them into your volumes once
| you docker-compose up your containers.
| soheilpro wrote:
| I've always wanted SmarterMail for Linux. Maddy seems to be
| exactly that. I'll definitely check it out.
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