this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2025
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I tried maybe 15 years ago and it went about as well as you'd expect for back then. But I'm starting to get the itch again.

Have any of you tried relatively recently? How impossible is it to get reliable deliverability to gmail and whatnot these days?

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[–] CarbonatedPastaSauce@lemmy.world 18 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

I’ve been hosting my own email servers for 20 years without issue. But email systems were a huge part of my IT career so it was easy.

It works great if you have static IPs and know what you’re doing in terms of following best practices. If you’re missing those two things you’re going to have a bad time.

If you have the statics and want to learn, I’d recommend purchasing a test domain and getting the kinks worked out before you move a domain you care about to your own system.

[–] Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz 2 points 2 hours ago

I really like the idea of having my own server, where I could have a bunch of cool stuff like email, VPN, Nextcloud, and so much more. The primary reason why I don’t have a server like that, is because I can’t trust myself to follow the best practices. For a while now, I’ve been thinking that I should hire a proper professional to take care of all that.

[–] dontbelievethis@sh.itjust.works 4 points 19 hours ago (1 children)
[–] AtariDump@lemmy.world 25 points 19 hours ago (1 children)
[–] markstos@lemmy.world 11 points 15 hours ago

Lol. After professionally hosting email for 15 years I’m happy to let someone else handle it now.

About 90% of incoming mail will be spam and it will be your job to make sure you are doing good job of classifying it so you don’t get junk in your inbox and don’t lose real mail in the spam folder.

Then for outgoing mail you need to make sure SPF, DKIM and DMARC are all in order.

Then there is all the usual stuff of security updates, backups, monitoring, alerting, logging and having a plan for internet outages.

Yes, it’s all doable but I won’t expect it be “set and forget”. I expect there will be quite a bit of tuning with some possible spam and delivery problems while you get kinks worked out.