this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2025
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Isn't it better* to host a mail server at home than to use Proton or Tuta? (lemmy.cat)
submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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*With ‘better’ I mean that an encrypted solution is adequate in these cases because the mails are on other servers, and the companies/servers depend on the jurisdiction where they are located. But by hosting a mail server at home, even unencrypted, we are 100% in control of our data.

PS: is there a self-hosting mail server solution that stores everything encrypted? I already self-host almost everything I use, but not email.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

2 points I'm not sure got mentioned here

  1. There is a new hero on the block - his name is mox and he is bloody awesome! It's a single binary written in go, that takes care of (citing) ...IMAP4, SMTP, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, MTA-STS, DANE and DNSSEC, reputation-based and content-based junk filtering, Internationalization (IDNA), automatic TLS with ACME and Let's Encrypt, account autoconfiguration, webmail.. pretty much everything. As somebody who maintains few mailservers for living - this is a wet dream come true. It implements eg MTA-STS that I haven't seen even on many commercial offerings yet. You run it once - it returns a long file with DNS records for MX, SPF, DMARC, DKIM etc... You run it second time with some switch - it generates its systemd file. Then you just spin it up - and that's it. I always wanted to write something like this but I am nowhere near clever enough. There may be some performance constrains, it's probably not "production grade" yet - but I've been using it for over a year with stellar results.

  2. There has been a lot of gatekeeping (they call it security strengthening) going on lately. In my experience even year ago If you managed to fit into your DKIM / DMARC / SPF rules stated in your DNS records you could still deliver pretty much everywhere. Even with a dynamic IP. As of June 2024 google started enforce PTR records and M$ I believe followed (meaning if your ip doesn't have a correct PTR record your mail isn't deliverable to Google / Microsoft mailservers). Most residential ISPs will not enable you to edit your PTR and since more and more people / companies use bloody google /M$ cloud services I don't think it's worth running mailserver just from home because the deliverability would be a hit and miss. You need at least to proxy the outgoing mail through some cheap VPS with public ip that you can set a PTR on.