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Email for self hosted services? (Not personal email)
(lemmy.today)
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this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2026
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@crandall selfhosting an email server is far from being a hassle. Nowadays it is really easy. You can setup everything in less an hour.
I use stalwart + a postfix relay on a cheap vps.
Ah yes. Fuck with dns, reverse dns/ptr records, dmarc, dkim, spf, verify server is not on a blacklisted ip in spamhaus, stand up a server, then implement anti spam filters, and hope anything you send doesn't end up in someone else's spam filters, as well as monthly checks to make sure no spam lists have sudddenly added your domain/ip to said lists.
But hey easy right?
Actually yes, if you take each piece one step at a time it's not that bad, as long as you are not expecting a fully functioning mail server on day 1 it's relatively easy.
Yeah, this is self hosting after all. If you don't expect some challenges to work though then you're not gonna not have a good time.
The crazy thing is I can do a mail server easily, but I always get stuck or annoyed with docker, everyone says docker is easy 🤷
Yeah that's going to depend a lot on the images you're running. If it's a published one the likely it'll have a compose or at least a one liner to get it running. But yeah there can always be issues with hard coded IDs and if you want to give the host folders 777 or limit them. Are you running selinux and that's going to get in the way. Did they not mention capabilities that needed to be added?
And if you're building your own or extending that a whole other ball of wax.
And I typically run on k8s so that adds a whole other layer of complexity. But I've been using it for years and I'm actually more comfortable with it than just docker or podman.
I tend to just say fuck it and run a full KVM image
Could always use LXCs they're lighter weight than a VM but they're IMHO more complicated to get started with than Docker / Podman as there isn't as big an ecosystem, unless you run a hypervisor that supports them. If you run a hypervisor then Proxmox and I think OpenStack are they only two I know that support them natively.
@Dultas @selfhosted @Theoriginalthon
You could install incus on almost every Linux system out there
Maybe one day I'll get time to test Proxmox alternatives but I have a lot of playbooks I'd need to migrate if I went with something else.
It is kind of a hassle to get all your DNS set up so your mail doesn't go to spam. If you don't already know what you're doing it will probably take over an hour.
Even if properly setup it could still go to spam until you get your reputation score up which with low volumes will take ages.
So i was thinking about this from a dns perspetive. If you have a dns forwarder can you not configure it to ensure that emails from the local smtp server never leave tour lan?
If you have local SMTP and IMAP you can send mail on your own systems, or if you're not using containers and you run everything on the same system you may even be able to skip SMTP and just deliver directly. But if you want to receive mail from outside your LAN you'll need a way to access your IMAP server.