Re:G Suite Horror Story
by u801e on Sunday August 05, 2018 @01:08AM
(#17689802)
I believe most residential internet services block outgoing connections on port 25, so you would either need to upgrade to a business plan or pay for a cloud server to run your own email server.
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Some vps services block 25 as well but it is usually configurable. The monthly cost of a vps is a few coffees and you get much more robust hardware and environmental conditions for your server and much better management tools. I did the home server thing well over a decade ago with a commodity pc sitting on a small ups. The main concern was leaving it running unattended when away from the house for any time. Especially during summer heatwaves. I found it wasn't a sustainable solution if you do any amount of travelling away from home.
Even if they don't block 25, most smtp server will increase the spam level if they receive an email from a dynamic Ip or and Ip which reverse DNS doesn't match the server name.
If you just want to receive emails then it's probably fine.
You can run the Mail Transport Agent (MTA) SMTP server on a VPS, then run the Mail Delivery Agent (MDA) POP3/IMAP server at the home server.
I run mine on a $2.5/month VPS with vultr. The price is so low its just not worth running at home.
By that same logic, you might as well just use Fastmail and save yourself the hassle of running your own mailserver altogether - their cheapest plan is $3 a month (or $2.5 a month if you pay for a year at a time).
It's not at all a bad idea. When I had a look at all the pricings it seemed to be price per user. I have a few domains and loads of "users" on my $2.5 server. It's only me using it but I like to have different addresses for different things and it doesn't look like other hosts support this without paying the per user cost.
You can have multiple aliases for the same user. I have about 20-30 email addresses (across multiple domains) from my previous setup all aliased to my main FastMail account.
On top of that, FastMail has a killer feature if you like have different addresses for different things. For example, say your email is [email protected] and somewebsite.com is asking you to provide an email address.
You can just put in [email protected] and FastMail will automatically route that to your mail email as if you had used [email protected]. You don't need to do anything beforehand and can just create these emails on the fly when you encounter a sign-up form.
It simplifies things greatly and if you start getting spam on one, you can just block it.
This is one of my favourite FastMail features.