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I prefer to follow the advice from people who actually set up and maintain email servers: “Fucking don’t. It’s not worth it.”
Just get a custom domain and run it through an existing email provider.
I’ve been running my own eMail server for almost a quarter century, and I have no clue what all the fuss is about.
Sure, providers are getting very picky about what domains that they will receive eMails from. But that’s why I have gMail, Yahoo, and Microsoft webmail accounts - so I can train their systems by exchanging emails once a quarter.
And yes, you do have to be running whitelists and blacklists and tarpits and have a good Fail2Ban in place. And good geoIP system if you want to cut out regions that you are unlikely to ever have legitimate mail originate from. But that’s just common sense security.
I hate that it's come to this, but you are right.
It's not that it's too difficult, it's that there are too many things beyond your control due to the central duopoly of Google and Microsoft for email. If you end up in their bad graces it's hard to get out, and they don't care about you, there's no support or someone to talk to to get off the ban list.
Would you care to give some additional context here? I haven't had the itch to host my own e-mail, but what kinds of misfortune do you encounter when you're not in the good graces of Google of Microsoft? And what could land you in that situation?
Mostly reputation of your IP address and domain, things which are hard to untangle. If you manage to get a clean IP you might be all clear.
There's other configurations that are required and if not right can harm your reputation, it isn't something you can set and forget.
What is your reputation in this context? And what does losing it cost you?
Deliverability to major providers like Google or Microsoft. Can be just getting your emails flagged as spam, or them being sikently dropped and never delivered even to spam. Making it impossible know if your emails are being ignored by the recipient or not even delivered to their inbox. It's also impossible to troubleshoot.
Maybe you said so in some lingo that's foreign to me, but what upsets that reputation? What kinds of configurations do they not like, and why is it not set and forget? Sorry for asking for a dissertation, but I never had any idea e-mail could be more complicated than set and forget.
There are a few standards now, DKIM, SFP, DMARC, maybe more now, I don't know. If you send emails without these configured correctly the reputation of the domain and IP are lowered.
Past some internal threshold, you go from inbox to spam, and from spam to silently dropped.
Further, if you send too many emails in a short time, or more emails than usual, your reputation is lowered.
I'm sure there's more, but these are the kind of things that make it difficult. You make a config error, don't realize, then people start not getting your emails. You fix the config, but there's no way to get the reputation back and nobody at Microsoft or Google to ask to re-evaluate you.
Gotcha, thanks for taking the time to humor me. I never would have guessed.
Yes exactly. For me, I could figure it out given enough weekends. But screw that. For my wife, my kids, my mom and dad, those things are hyroglyphics.