AND YET, every time the subject of messaging comes up everyone cries how what we really need is federation and not walled gardens.

And this is precisely why walled gardens are attractive. Because when you realize the work that you have to put in to make federation work you give up and go running back into your walled garden.

I'm one of those people who shouts in anger and frustration any time the subject comes up. Self hosting email is a pain in the arse. Google and MS are deliberately making it a pain in the arse. Spammers are making it a pain in the arse. Users with shitty passwords and compromised accounts are a pain in the arse.

But please, don't get me wrong. We need more decentralized email again. But what we need even more than that is less hotmail and less gmail. I feel much better telling someone to pay some $company a small fee for email hosting than I would telling them to suck it up and embrace the pain.

I have been self-hosting email (and anything else I can figure out how to self-host) for nearly 20 years. Still found useful things in your guide. Thanks.

If you have a lot of time to kill and don't need reliable email, self-hosting is fine. But it's a bit like building your own car. Fun hobby: not reliable.

Speak for yourself - I've hosted my own email for over half a decade and never had any issues whatsoever. Set it up once, keep paying your DNS/VPS provider, and update your box every now and then, and you won't have any issues.

Of course, it's more work than having Google or Fastmail do it, but so what? I'm sure a significant majority of HN readers already have a VPS and domain name of some kind. Setting aside a few hours to set up a mail server on it isn't the indentured servitude many of y'all make it out to be.

If you follow the guide in this post, you will have reliable email delivery without involving a possibly untrustworthy 3rd party. What part of it seemed overly time-consuming or difficult?

If you're worried about monitoring it for operation, make sure there is at least one automated email that passes in each direction once daily. Use pingdom free to check for basic up/down. That should suffice for a personal email system. Email senders will retry for days before giving up.

I say this as someone who has been hosting his own email on his own hardware on his own ISP connection (on OpenBSD no less!) for over a decade, and have never had a delivery issue

> you will have reliable email delivery without involving a possibly untrustworthy 3rd party

Only if you limit your email messages to parties that also use your personal email service.

Seriously. Who are these people who don't seem to know what DNSRBLs are, who don't know about IP blackholing, who don't know about spammers stealing private addresses and getting your domain blacklisted, or sending out too many mails at once and getting tagged as a spammer, or sharing your IP space, or not getting accepted from various domains for not having a high enough "reputation", etc?

I mean, I must not know what I'm talking about, having run personal and corporate mail systems for 15 years. Must be pretty easy to get the DNS extensions which aren't used uniformly across major mail carriers right. And hey, if your ISP gets blackholed it should be pretty easy to fix, right? And you just have to set up a separate system with automated tests to alert you when your service is down so you can get it back up in a few days before the bounces start going out. And certainly maintaining your own spam filters has never been difficult, to say nothing of software upgrades, maintenance outages, security patches, offsite backups, certificate renewals, and moving hosting providers.

But, yeah. Easy.

I've been running half a dozen domains since OpenBSD 2.5, over multiple hardware platforms and ISPs, and I have never felt any of the pain you're talking about.

I've never had a reputation problem, but I've been sure to test for open relay on my servers as step zero. Maybe I've been lucky over the 4 ISPs I've had, but I've always ended up with clean IPs. In any case, that would be something you'd catch during initial setup and have to deal with before sending out your first email. This may be super painful to deal with, but I don't have any experience (fortunately).

I update my server OS (openbsd) once every 6 months and use long-lived self-signed certs for STARTTLS mail delivery. Combined with DNSSEC and DANE it makes for a trustworthy setup. Certbot for any certs that are more important to have a chain of trust for.

I set up DNSSEC/DANE/DKIM/SPF once over a couple of days and have never had a problem. I don't even have any spam to filter out after having domains for decades and lots of friends and family members using it. Google sends regular reports verifying that no one is using my domains for spam campaigns (at least to gmail addresses).

There are free online services to help generate configs for, and test for the correct configuration of each part of these setups.

Removable hard drives and fsarchiver make for simple offsite backups (just store them at work). But if you don't have a good backup plan, whether you're running your own email system or not, you've got bigger problems.

I'm sure you're dealing with bigger and more sophisticated setups than my vanity domains, but I'm not talking about those. I sometimes don't touch the email side of my system for years. Once set up it just works.

The only reason a self-built car won't be reliable is because you don't know what you are doing. The same goes for email. If you take the time to understand what you are doing it is perfectly fine.

Works reliably for me since 1997.

Same here. I used to host out of my house. Now its on a server in a data center somewhere. Some of it is written in perl - which I have no problem reading (spamassassin).

You guys are reporting deliverability success precisely because you've (like me) been doing it for decades. The gmail filters know that your IP and sender domain are kosher. However if you were to set up a new domain and new server today the filters would default to "spammer" for your status.

Remember that the spam filters are aiming for "deliver no spam" rather than "deliver all legitimate email, but no spam" so your new server's messages being delivered helps the bonus prospects of nobody at Google.

The Internet is in a sad state of affairs when the consensus amung "hackers" is just to use gmail because gmail is so horrible to work with. I guess google is really becoming the new Microsoft.

I've moved between 3 different residential IPs in 5 years and I've never had that problem. I really don't get why other people think it's so hard.

Sure, my grandmother isn't likely to build her own mail-server, but anyone with a spare computer, and a spare afternoon can.

I set up my domain and email server only a couple years ago and it works well, but like some of the others here who've reported success, I'm not running a big operation.