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Reflections on running my own mail server for 10 years
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this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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It's an interesting post, but saying it's "not hard" and then "welllllll it's not hard if you don't bother with a spam filter & pay a professional company for 'important' email" is pretty misleading.
It's also not true. I ran an own mail server for a few years. If you're strict with the protocols it actually isn't a hard thing. Even setting up spam filtering isn't really complicated. Everything has to be done once. Maintenance really isn't problematic. Just keep an eye on the monitoring if something crazy is happening and regularly do updates and check your certificates.
Author here. Let me clarify.
It is not particularly difficult from a technical point of view.
But if you get blocked by big tech even when doing everything right (reverse DNS, SPF, DMARC, DKIM, RFC compliant MTA), you have to beg them to unblock you. This part is time consuming.
I've read horror stories where it went well for years until suddenly Gmail started flagging well-behaved servers as spam without any clear reason. Sometimes mail got through, sometimes it didn't, without any clear pattern or explanation.
I simply don't have that kind of time and nerves to deal with this. "hard" may be the wrong word, but it is nerve-wrecking.
I have been running my own mail server with similar requirements for 20 years now.
I empathize that getting flagged by major providers is the most worrisome part.
Yet, it's not as bad as it was in the years 2012-2015 when SPF, dkim and dmarc strated becoming mandatory.
I maintain my outbound server against all odds, mostly because I think it's very important that independent providers can still exist.