Ask HN: How do you do your email delivery?

Re:Ask HN: How do you do your email delivery? by __david__ on Sunday January 15, 2012 @07:35AM (#3467013)

I use good old sendmail for SMTP and cyrus for IMAP. I don't think SMTP has to have "5 nines" uptime because SMTP is very resilient to machines being offline due to the default delivery timeouts being very long (4 or more days).

My approach to email is that I know that it will take an entire day to set it up no matter how simple it seems. There's nothing like configuring an SMTP server that makes you think, "wow, email is surprisingly complicated!"

But! Once it's set up I find it's one of the more stable services I run. Very little hand-holding is needed once it's up and running.

Cyrus is a little harder (mostly because you have to deal with SASL--yet another layer of authentication). But it runs fast and smoothly. I found that upgrading between major versions can be a large hassle (I had to do manual database conversions). Luckily it's so stable that there hasn't been a new major version in a number of years.

For mailing lists I use mailman (though honestly I haven't run a mailing list in about 10 years so there may be better alternatives now).

For email automation I usually just use a pipe-style alias in /etc/aliases.

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Re:Ask HN: How do you do your email delivery? by aidian on Sunday January 15, 2012 @12:59PM (#3467726)

I set up postfix + dovecot (with Squirrel Mail front end) on my own VPS just to see if I could do it, and it worked fine. It was a huge PITA to set up, but I knew that going in. The only problems I ever had was with Craigslist bouncing my email, and I fixed that. BUT this is just a personal email.

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