*With ‘better’ I mean that an encrypted solution is adequate in these cases because the mails are on other servers, and the companies/servers depend on the jurisdiction where they are located. But by hosting a mail server at home, even unencrypted, we are 100% in control of our data.
PS: is there a self-hosting mail server solution that stores everything encrypted? I already self-host almost everything I use, but not email.
Hosting email is hard. Getting your reputation up to a point where emails will even be delivered is challenging, and then you have to worry about the absolute non-stop attacks on your server. Patch, patch, patch…
What if is like to receive emails? I don’t really send emails at all lol
Is it really THAT difficult? Hillary Clinton did it…
Honestly? No. It takes a bit of reading into SPF, DMARC, DKIM etc., and you will need to set up an authentication method (using PAM means you need to cache your unix users credentials in mail clients), which is easy via the dovecot passwd driver. The problem is that some blocklists will block any residential connection per default, but mxtoolbox will search through those, and I basically only needed to fill out spamhouses unblock form, which is easy. Even my employer (major bank) seamlessly accepts any emails from my domain.
Bruteforce attacks can be caught with fail2ban and reported to abuseIPDBIt takes a bit of reading into SPF, DMARC, DKIM etc.,
That alone is often (usually?) not enough. Since many IP addresses are already blackholed before you even set up a mail server on one, there is also the slow and sometimes painful process of:
- Figuring out by trial-and-error which recipients are not receiving mail from you (or are receiving it directly into their spam folders).
- Figuring out which email filtering services are used by those recipients’ mail providers.
- Figuring out how to contact those filtering services.
- Figuring out what process each filtering service uses for requesting removal from their blacklists (or adding to their whitelists).
- Navigating each of those processes.
- Submitting documentation of having done so.
- Waiting and hoping for the filtering services accept your request and start allowing mail from you.
…and then starting all over again every so often, whenever a filtering service changes their configs or a new one appears.
It can be done, and you might get lucky, but it often requires tenacity and a lot of patience.
The fact you are asking scares me a little. If you are seriously thinking about this, please don’t - you will very likely become an open relay, which is bad for everyone. It won’t even help with your privacy concerns. Seriously. Running a mail server is a full time job.
One thing you’ll find about self-hosting is that you find yourself on the other side of the spam shield very often, and getting your server to a point where other servers won’t block or filter you can be a challenge, especially if your IP or domain is on more aggressive lists like Spamhaus.
Besides that it’s not really that much different from hosting another Federated service, which you seem to have experience with.
Self-hosting has other drawbacks. Your need to maintain your server, you need a steady internet connection and a steady power supply. These are things providers like Proton and Tuta deal with for you.
