selfhosted email server, AT HOME with residential IP reddit / selfhosted ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Amour86 · 2023-11-15 19:51 before wasting time, can I host a mail server on my home server and use cloudflare tunnel. or still I will have reputation problem ---------------------------------------------------------------------- apperrault · 2023-11-15 20:14 CAN you do it, probably. Is there a LOT of work, defiantly. Are you likely still going to get reputation problems without doing a lot of work, VERY. With things like SendGrid or other free mail systems, it doesn't seem worth it any more. I used to host exchange at home and it was cool, but with SPAM, SPF, DKIM, DMARC it honestly isn't worth it in most cases. Honestly, if our company didn't rely on it for daily flow, I wouldn't even want to host it for work any more ​ app ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ultrahkr · 2023-11-15 20:29 Currently that's not possible unless you have business internet. Basically ISP can mark whole IP ranges as residential, so any email sent from those is marked as spam no matter how you set it up... It's cheaper to pay Google or similar $6 per month and avoid the hassle of locally hosted mail server. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- bixxus · 2023-11-15 20:34 I'll preface this by saying I host my own email, but I *don't* host it at home. I've also entertained the idea of running a tunnel to bring it in house (although not with cloudflare). You're going to run into 2 main issues that I see: 1. I only did a brief search so I don't know if there's documentation narrowing the range of ips that are used for tunnels, but cloudflare publishes [this](https://www.cloudflare.com/ips/) list of IP ranges that they own. By my calculation that's a little over 1.5M addresses and you don't have any control over what IP is being used when sending out email. This means that you have to add every one of those ranges to your spf record. It also means that if one of those IP addresses does land on a blacklist you have no control over whether or not outgoing mail will be sent from it, and for 1.5M addresses that's a pretty substantial risk. 2. I don't know how you plan on using email, but for me email needs to be reliable. I can't have emails I send getting dropped and I always need to be able to receive email. This is one service that, essentially, there's no maintenance windows on. It has to always be up. That is something that's extremely difficult to do at home. At a bare minimum your risk profile is just your ISP provider. Residential connections generally don't have SLA agreements. This means that if they it's going to go down for an hour or two for maintenance that's outside of your control. Or if there's a storm that takes down the utility lines, there's no guarantees in place about how quickly that can get fixed. And again that's the bare minimum: you also have to think about always having power, hardware failure, software failure, software upgrades, etc. There's a lot that goes into making a service have a high degree of reliability and the reality is that it's exceptionally hard to do at home. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- bixxus · 2023-11-15 20:39 I agree that it's not a good idea, but he's not talking about sending email from his residential IP. He's wondering about using cloudflare's IPs for reputation purposes. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- adamshand · 2023-11-15 20:49 The reputation problem with hosting email at home is that most residential IPs are blacklisted. The way around this is to relay your mail through another server (all SMTP servers support this, it's often called a "smarthost"). This can either be an SMTP server you setup on a VPS with a clean IP or a commercial SMTP relay like Amazon SES. Cloudflare tunnels are for inbound traffic and can't help with this. Delivering email to a home SMTP server doesn't have any reputation challenges, you just need to expose port 25 on your SMTP server to the internet (or again proxy it somehow). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Amour86 · 2023-11-15 20:51 Thanks all :) much appreciated ---------------------------------------------------------------------- simonmcnair · 2023-11-15 21:04 Yes you can do it but from what I hear without being a big company your chances of not being blacklisted are high. I wouldn't bother personally. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Simon-RedditAccount · 2023-11-15 21:07 Possible - yes. Do you want it? Probably, no. Especially, SMTP. Better use something like Zeptomail (cheapest) for delivery. You can still self-host the receiver. *Mandatory do-not-self-host-at-home notice: custom domain at* [*skiff.com*](https://skiff.com) *is free, iCloud+ Mail is $0.99 and Zoho is $1.25/mo.* ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ohv_ · 2023-11-15 21:13 I do it. I have a cheap vps that is a smart relay. I use ASSP on the back end VPN to my home. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ericjhmining · 2023-11-15 21:29 That's not necessarily true. My local ISP gives out static ip's to both business/residential and they are from the same blocks. I have a static residential IP block and a mail server I use for my business. Zero issues. I had a VPS for mail before and had more issues with that IP than my residential one. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- DrDJF · 2023-11-15 22:20 I do too. Axigen mail server and sendinblue now brevity as free smarthost. Mainly use it for notifications from homelab and for things that don't play as well with other free smtp such as the printer I use for scanning and emailing stuff ---------------------------------------------------------------------- io-x · 2023-11-16 06:10 I would say no. Most ISPs block incoming mail ports to residential IPs. Test your ports before everything else. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- HTTP_404_NotFound · 2023-11-16 18:08 Long story short- you CAN. But, you are going to have nothing bug headaches, issues, and unreceived/undelivered messages... For many reasons. Most email providers will outright block residential IP ranges. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- watchdog_timer · 2023-11-16 19:31 I don't think so. (I've asked about this on Cloudflare's forum in the past.) You can host a mail server at home, but not through a Cloudflare tunnel. A domain's MX record for its mail server [must point to an A or AAAA record](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MX_record), but a Cloudflare tunnel can only be specified using a CNAME record. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- s3r3ng · 2023-11-16 20:35 Paying Google loses privacy and control. You are paying a much higher real price than just the few $$. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- s3r3ng · 2023-11-16 20:36 As I understand it Cloudflare tunnels expose your machine and perhaps more of your LAN to cloudflare. I also have deep dislike for central points of failure and possible control like this. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ultrahkr · 2023-11-16 20:45 $6 bucks x user month, yes I know there are cheaper alternatives... But which provider with a screw left is going to block Gmail IP range... ---------------------------------------------------------------------- SleepingProcess · 2023-11-17 13:53 > can I host a mail server on my home server and use cloudflare tunnel. No. IPs of cloud flare are blocked on most email servers and you really need port 25 be opened. Also residential IPs are in PBL lists, which also used on email servers to get rid of army infected PC. If you going to get intermediate proxy, choose them carefully due to a lot of cheap (or with bad reputation) hostings are rejected (or has much more spam score) too