Hello everyone, nice to meet you all.
This question was probably asked around here but is it really possible to be your own mail provider?
I think I’m experienced enough when it comes to homelabbing that I could take on something like this.
I THINK im aware of the technicalities, I did some research but it still begs the question, is it really worth it? would it be hard to build up a reputation so that your emails don’t land in spam folders?
If my understanding is correct, reputation building would be nigh impossible for a self-hosted server.
I host my own email and reputation has been a huge problem. I don’t send spam, but they just block whole subnets. When I fill out the appeal form, I never hear back and nothing ever happens. It is very frustrating. I’m using DKIM, SPF, and all the other stuff. Still having problems. :(
You can just use a relay for your first hop that’s what I do since my ISP finally got round to adding my IP to the PBL. There are some that have a more reasonable amount of deliveries in their free tier than others.
yeah its something that seems to be splitting the community, some say that they haven’t had a single problem while others say its borderline impossible
Instead of trying to build reputation, you can buy it. Pick a reputable spam solution that offers accounts for like $3-5/m and route all mail through it.
Still your server, your mail, but you’re buying their business reputation, and getting some spam filtering back. Plus you might get some protection from outages or maintenance windows if they can cache some mail for delivery for you
Depending what you find acceptable there are things you can do. For example at work we proxy through a mailgun account to do simple smtp notifications from bash scripts and webapps.I would imagine you could also proxy from an email server.
And you can at least manage your own email domain accounts via various webhosts. This may not meet your criteria for self hosted but its more independent then using gmail.
So it boils down to it’s doable but it requires a lot of effort and dedication.