Sending mail reddit / selfhosted ---------------------------------------------------------------------- yldf · 2023-10-27 09:45 I'm planning the transition to self-hosted mail. I did fully self-host mail >10 years ago, so I know how to do it in essence, but I'd like to go a bit softer now, and not host outbound myself, it's just too annoying. What's your take on that? Do you self-host SMTP as well? Why or why not? If not, what providers do you use for it (especially in Europe, or even Germany)? How reliable are they? What's the maximum attachment size? What do you pay for it? ​ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- InfamousAgency6784 · 2023-10-27 10:22 Don't, just don't. SMTP is so easy to abuse that the low-effort anti-spam feature the GAFAM has implemented is simply ignoring anything not coming from the others (or sending it directly to spam). That's in spite of all the newish (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) DNS records that were supposed to help with this. In theory, you need a "good IP", in practice, anything on a VPS won't be "good" and any residential IP won't be "good" so you are screwed. Atop of that, while e.g. Google has been good (at least in the past) to actually accept VPS IPs as long as they are not in a blacklist, Microsoft will blacklist anything not coming from registered Exchange server or not provided by one of the great providers. Emails just need to die. IM could replace that, if only they had a mode of function that would stop with the "instant" crap. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- kon_dev · 2023-10-27 11:16 Not sure, why you want to host email yourself. If it is just for privacy reasons, you could also have a look into posteo.de (I am customer for years, no ads, nearly zero spam, you can even pay with cash if your like) or mailbox.org. German providers and especially posteo is really tracking a minimum amount of data, just as much as they are required by law. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- watchdog_timer · 2023-10-27 11:43 I self-host incoming mail and send outgoing mail using Mailjet's free plan to ensure deliverability. I've used them for several years and found them very reliable. Occasionally our outgoing mail is routed to spam despite having our DKIM and SPF records set per Mailjet's instructions. I'm not sure anyone else would be consistently better based on emailtooltester.com's annual deliverability reports. Their maximum attachment size is 15 MB, but they don't recommend anything over 5 MB, as some providers block anything larger than that (which I've found to be true). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- yldf · 2023-10-27 12:20 I want to host mail storage myself, mainly. Posteo, for example, is extremely expensive there. At 0.25 EUR per GB per month that would easily be a three-figure charge per month. I do have the infrastructure for backing up the data on the server, but archiving email outside of IMAP and managing my data not exceeding 20 GB or something is not what I want. My mail accounts can be hundreds of gigs and that is fine. My question is mostly about SMTP, which I do not want to do myself. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- yldf · 2023-10-27 12:20 That’s why I wrote I don’t want to host SMTP myself… ---------------------------------------------------------------------- InfamousAgency6784 · 2023-10-27 12:24 And that's why I wrote a 100-line post. Did you just stop at the first line? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- yldf · 2023-10-27 13:08 I'll need hundreds of Gigabytes of storage. That's kind of the point. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- InfamousAgency6784 · 2023-10-27 13:29 Proton provides 500GB for $10/month if you pay for 1 year up front. It's $8/month if you pay for 2 years up front. Tutanota does the same for €8/month and that's assuming you want everything on there. If you run a couple VPSes (for HA) + storage, you'll easily reach that too. All that being said, I am having a very hard time believing you need hundreds of GBs of emails at the ready all the time. If what you need is an archive of all those emails somewhere (which I believe is what you implied with you "hundreds of GBs"), that's a completely different problem: just run an email archival tool atop of any online service (with backups, obviously). Most of them can archive emails older than a specific threshold and delete them once the backup is done. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- yldf · 2023-10-27 13:34 One of the best so far. The problem I'm having with most providers is them charging per e-mail account. I want to be able to create accounts e.g. for my family without paying extra. The 15 accounts on that 10 Euro package would be sufficient, though. At the same time, I have very big accounts with three-digit GB space requirements, and others which would be fine with 1 GB. That makes this "50 GB per mailbox" offers pretty useless. 500 GB shared among all accounts is a start. That's also why the thought of self-hosting (receiving and storing side): I'm not restricted in the number of accounts and can manage storage myself. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- yldf · 2023-10-27 14:02 I've read Tutanota have trouble with standards (IMAP, SMTP, etc.). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- InfamousAgency6784 · 2023-10-27 14:07 They have a family plan for up to 6 users. 500GB **per user** (actually 3TB total, AFAIK you split as you want), 90 mailboxes total, 10 VPN devices for $20/month... For the other plans, prices are actually per user per month. But again, by connecting each email address to a self-hosted email archival tool, you'll get better reliability for much cheaper. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- bityard · 2023-10-27 15:37 I self host my own mail, SMTP in and out. But I've also had this vps in the US from a small local hosting provider for a decade. Unfortunately vps providers can be a crap shoot if you're looking for a new one. My back up plan is this one goes south is to just use a cloud provider's SMTP relay service (eg aws) because their prices for that sort of thing are extremely reasonable for small volume. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Mabed_ · 2023-10-27 17:17 I use mailjet with tls on port 465 for all self hosted it provides me with end-to-end security and ensures that emails arrive at the correct destination, it's much less burdensome to manage Is free over 6000 mails / month (200 days) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- yldf · 2023-10-27 17:32 Any good self-hosted mail archive tool with web and mobile interfaces (searchable)? Aside from a dovecot server just for archiving… ---------------------------------------------------------------------- sashafe · 2023-10-27 19:49 I use smtp2go service. Free tier more than enough for personal mail! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- GWBrooks · 2023-10-27 23:00 Amazon SES is a virtually zero-cost solution for SMTP. You can set up a smart relay on your mail server or simply have users plug in the SES SMTP. The Exim mail server used in the free Hestia control panel also allows for using local SMTP or relayed SMTP on a per-dimain basis. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- lachlan-00 · 2023-10-28 00:14 I just host from my garage using courier http://www.courier-mta.org/ Maybe it's hard to do in other countries but in Australia I've done this since about 2008 and moved around a lot and used different static ips. Mail isn't hard. Just don't set up a shit server