On Sat, 3 Oct 2026, Dianne Skoll via linux wrote:
I guess not many people self-host their email any more. :(
I have only self-hosted email of my personal domains and business for 27+
years, and now the Centretown BUZZ community newspaper.
With care, self-hosted email can be run successfully.
I have run weekly email lists critical to my business income using
phpList. I moved the newspaper's 'list' from Google groups to the OVH
Beauharnois (data centre this side of Montreal) years ago. Reliable email
is critical to the operation of the Centretown BUZZ operations as it
would be for any newspaper.
My personal and business inbound and outbound email service has been / is still
hosted in my basement on a now 16-years-old i5 computer.
Advantages of self-hosting:
- Essentially unlimited storage
Yes. It's fun and sometimes useful to pull out a 25-year old email message to
use jokingly against a friend :-)
- No ads
I still use a text-based user agent like Alpine and can almost always classify
spam just looking at the mail index line, for the spam that leaks through.
Alpine is great - no mouse needed. Mutt is similarly good.
Because disks are big and email is small, I kept all spam I received. I can go
through it to see the 'seasonal spam colour trends' over the years. lol. Maybe
I will delete it some day.
- I'd know for sure if a government agency got a court order to look
at my mail server. :)
This has been a very important personal reason for me to host email in my own
home. Only legitimate access by government, and minimized exposure to
surveillance capitalists.
- Mail hosted in Canada
Absolutely important. Mail hosted in my Ottawa home.
Encrypted, offsite backups are essential and an added responsibility of
course.
Disadvantages:
- You need a strategy to deal with spam
The usual spam-fighting measures work quite well IMO. I hardly get any spam
these days.
Pro-tip: reject all email from all the new TLDs like .deals, .makeup and a
hundred others.
I also firewall-block IP addresses of worst countries for vulnerability probing
and spam because I have no legit interactions with them. If someone in South
Korea really needs to reach me they can use gmail.
- Deliverability can be tricky
I have had just a few delivery issues over the years. Despite sending a lot of
spam itself, MS is a bit of a PITA when your mail gets blocked, but they do
respond to a formal ublock request in response to their auto-blocking of your
IP (SNDS). In the interim I just route mail for MS domains to another email
server, after I add it to the SPF record for the outbound domain and to a
Postfix transport table.
If you are careful about your mail and DNS configuration, getting on a
blacklist is very unlikely. There are one or two mentioned in this thread
that likely exist to shake small email operators down for $$, but they are
ignored by the big mail service providers.
- You need your own domain name
Everyone should have at least one.
- Realistically, you need a hosted server to act as your MX host
Realistically, I have had minimal problems running an inbound and oubound
mail server on my Teksavvy DSL service with static IP on a server in my
basement, for 20 years this month.
(Teksavvy will set up a PTR for you without hassle, and even delegate DNS for a
subnet if you have one.)
For me, the advantages are worth it. I have archives of all my mail since
1991. :)
Back to 1989 at least for me, quickly checking now. :-) Somewhere I also have
!ve3pak bang path email from the uucpmail system run by the OCUNIX group before
Linux came along. (I was running my basement server on SVR4 Unix on a 386
before Linux.)
I set up an internal email service for Citizens for Safe Cycling (now operating
as "Bike Ottawa") and installed modems in board members' computers in the 1990s
so we could communicate electronically. It was much better than printing
meeting agendas and reports and licking stamps and snail-mailing them, lol. I
already had an extra phone line for fax which could also be used for modems
dialing in to the mail server.
All this said, running an outbound email server to this extent is challenging.
You better undertand and properly implement/configure DNS (ideally DNSSEC to
increase your mail rep/deliverability), PTR, DKIM, SPF, DMARC, TLS
certificates, MTA-STS, TLS-RPT, etc. It's not just SMTP.
I enjoy a technical challenge, especially when success has real-world
benefits and failure has real consequences. Self-hosted email service has been
like a hobby to me.
Brett
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