Homelab

No.

I would say absolutely not.

This talk will probably be helpful in convincing you why it's not worth it

https://youtu.be/mrGfahzt-4Q?si=24HCKydAqngWogB1

Absolutely not. It's notoriously hard.

Ask that question about anything, and ask these same questions about the same:

Do you want to learn? Do you have a reason to want to have understanding and control over it? Do you have the time, resources, energy and aptitude?

You've just answered your own question :)

Some people have a deep distain for the idea of self-hosted email, but there's literally no good technical reason you can't do it yourself. I think people react so strongly and insist it shouldn't be self-hosted because they couldn't hack it ;)

(yes, I'm poking them for fun)

Seriously, the only compelling reason they mention isn't compelling: if you're worried about deliverability, pay a reputable service for smarthosting through them. Problem solved, and you still get to 100% control your own filtering, logging, storage and access.

Waste of time, massive headache, constant security threat. Set a relay up for outbound so you can get consolidated root mails and system alerts. But skip the inbound and let Apple/Google/someone else manage the threat surface.

I have an O365 instance hosting my own domain for mail

"is it recommended" implies that the wisdom of crowds (a) exists, b) applies, c) is correct.

What do YOU want to do? That's all that matters.

I've run my own mail server for over 20 years. I enjoy it, and its nice having my mail sit in my basement.

I selfhost everything I want except for email, just not worth it imo.

waste of time IMO. Most messages will not make it through spam filters because of a bunch of reasons. Just writing your friends would be pointless.

I set one up for a while and it was a royal PITA! I have since switched to a managed email account using my own domain. So much less trouble. It's just not worth it in my opinion.

Nope. Spam mail

setting up email is easy, configuring it so you don't get caught in spam filters, and you don't get a ton is a full time job. I did it for awhile and just didn't find it worthwhile any longer.

Always fun to do if learning but in production even for personal i would recommend you pay for something like startmail or mailfence and use their custom domain features.

i learned exchange on my own and even had dreams of doing multi tenant exchange until exchange online came and jerked off all over that dream

I heard that it is a thing you most likely do not want to have set up

I run three of them now, one since about 2005 and haven't had any blocking issues on it. I have also always set up DNS records as well as had a static IP.

I once set one up on a raspberry pi. It was compromised in about 5 minutes.

The biggest problem you'll run into is sending email from your residential internet connection. Most, if not all, residential ISPs either 100% block or severely throttle port 25 outbound traffic to cut down on spam. Even if you're able to find an ISP that doesn't block 25 outbound, if the reverse zone lookup indicates that it's a residential ISP most spam filtering solutions are going to flag all of your messages as spam.

Microsoft 365 paid is so cheap, it isn’t funny. I’d do that.

See docker-mailserver which is a full fledged email solution including spam assassin and anti virus. I use it for my business emails. Works perfectly

I do. But the domain I use it for is occasional sending. If it was for my job/business probably not.

I do not notice any delivery problems though. What you will need aside from DKIM/SPF, is a static IP and the ability to create reverse dns records.

I have Comcast business and I was surprised they did the reverse dns for me, but it has been working great. I get 10/10 on mail-tester.com.

For yourself as an experiment sure, but don't fuck around with your family's email.

If you have a home lab you've probably got devices that sent e-mail alerts so you could try running something internally to see how you get on.

I think some older devices don't have authentication and can only work internally.

Doing it for the experience and lab of it? Sure.

Doing it to actually use, fuck no. Email is the most vulnerable part of any org. You need to have a proper spam filter, dmz, web domain, several DNS records, certificates etc in order for mail to even flow in and out. It'll just be a headache and there are so many free options.

If you want your own special email domain, get suite for 1 person at 12 bucks a month and have it all just work.

After trials and errors, I find it good to work on as a hobby project / just for fun, but not for your day to day emails. In my case, my SMTP server literally only runs for my printer that has a scan-to-email feature on it, wouldn’t trust it for anymore than that

I've run my own mail server for over 15 years. If you're going to do it, put it on a VM at a reliable cloud provider, such as AWS. You wouldn't want your email to go down while you're on vacation for a week with no way of fixing it. You need to make sure you use a static IP that you keep forever, because your mail server builds reputation and the IP must not have any reputation of spam that has landed it on block lists.

It's not difficult if you let reuse someone else's hard work to make it secure and keep it updated. This project is fantastic: https://mailinabox.email/

Would I recommend it? It's more rational to bring your own domain to have it hosted by Microsoft or Google, but doing it yourself is more fun and flexible, and possibly cheaper depending on how many users and domains you will be hosting.

My first IT job was as mail admin.

I wouldn't wish that shit on anybody.

Everyone should at least give it a try, if only so your decision not to is well informed instead of following cargo cult advice.

I've hosted my own email for 2 years now. Using proxmox mail gateway on a 5€ hetzner VPS. it relays mail to my mail server which I host at home. I've dealt with my home public IP changing every now and then with 2 simple scripts. SPF, DKIM, DMARC is all set up.

All in all, it's relatively low maintenance. PMG makes a good job filtering all the crap and I have yet to receive and actual spam in my inbox (I only had a couple false positives).

I documented the whole setup, can share if you want.

No, it won't give you any good work experience. Everyone uses Office 365 or Gsuite these days, and most of the orgs still using on-prem Exchange are trying to switch.

It’s an interesting exercise to learn about how everything interacts and works. Beyond that I would absolutely not bother. It’s high effort, it’s shit to maintain and secure. It’s shit to debug when mails don’t arrive.

I'm running my own mailserver on a VPS for about 4 years. I'm using https://mailinabox.email/ It's a one command installer that installs everything you need for a mailserver to run, including roundcube webmail, nextcloud, DNS server, static html page hosting, and it runs on low resources, I'm using a very cheap VPS server with 1 core and 1GB RAM, I pay 3.79 euros monthly for VPS and it's been running great.

The only issue hosting your own non-bisiness mail server is that a lot of internet providers block incoming port 25, so you may not be able to recieve incoming mail. Getting a reverse DNS setup may be an issue as well which will bring your mail score down.... But you can increase the score with SPF and DKIM implementation.

Just make sure that you secure your server from unauthorized relay or you'll be blacklisted in no time.

Isn't this question asked on this forum every few months? It's easily searchable.

I'm using gmail with my own domain and I still get my email filtered out. You would need to warm your IP address for years to not get into spam folders in most places. Not to mention the uptime issue. I would not recommend. You may try fastmail or some similar service instead.

I would recommend to setup your own email server, or should we just all give up, like we gave up to Cloud providers?

Nah, I can't think of hardly any reasons why I'd want to, so many things to consider. Just not worth my time