Are there any disadvantages to self-hosting only incoming email?
3 years ago by Wander to c/selfhosted
I know the adage that self-hosting email is hard. I use a third party smtp server to send emails for my Lemmy instance in order to guarantee delivery, for example.
However, other than potential uptime, what are the disadvantages to setting up self-hosted incoming email?
Incoming email is like 99% of my email usage. I'm happy to use a third party mail provider for outgoing email, but don't see why I shouldn't simply host incoming email myself.
Thank you <3
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@lemmy.world
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
Be civil.
No spam.
Posts are to be related to self-hosting.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or readme if you're providing a link.
Submission headline should match the article title.
No trolling.
Promotion posts require active participation, with an account that is at least 30 days old. F/LOSS without a paywall has exceptions, with requirements. See the rules link for details. Tags [CBH] or [AIP] are required, see the links in Rule 8 for details.
AI-related discussions and AI-involved promotional posts have additional requirements for tagging, as noted in Rule 7 and the AI & Promotional Post Expanded Rules post, and find example disclosures here.
Resources:
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
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I've run Zentyal Community on a cheap 1c/2gb VPS for probably 5+ years. Receiving email has never been a problem, and I basically don't get spam. My top tip is to use a unique alias for everything, e.g. thirdpartyname.randomstring@your.domain every single time you have to give your email address for something. That way, when a third party is compromised and your provided alias starts receiving spam, you can just update your alias with them and on your MX. If you deliberately make any of your aliases public, you'll probably want to setup rspamd and postgrey.
Getting opendmarc, opendkim, certbot, etc set up in a way that Zentyal wouldn't nuke it everytime it updated was the biggest hassle for me, and I seem to remember having to open a ticket with Microsoft to get my outbound emails accepted by O365 too. Shouldn't be an issue anyway if you use a smarthost for outbound.
This definitely isn't an endorsement of Zentyal btw. In fact, to be clear, most of my setup efforts were spent fighting its design decisions. I'd recommend that you find something containerised which is well maintained and does only what you need. And put some time aside, especially if you've never set up an MX from scratch before.
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