I ran my own self-hosted email server from 2008-ish to 2018, and I would highly recommend against doing it! Especially when Fastmail and Proton are so cheap.
I was running Postfix+Dovecot+Seive+SpamAssassin+Fail2ban+certbot+spf+dkim+reverse-ip+<other random crap>
It worked! Receiving email was overall pretty easy. I know I also did things the "hard way" by ad-hoccing all that together, and today there are a lot more out-of-the-box solutions that do all that for you. But still. Being a full-time email administrator is a job I will never do again unless I'm getting paid for it.
You know what really sucked? Deliverability. Frequently, emails I would send would just ... vanish ... no warnings, no errors, no failures. From my end, everything was perfect. Until days later, people would follow up with me and say, "Are you going to send that email?" ...
I had a business IP (Comcast Business). The IP address was clean, not black listed anywhere, not on SORBS or other lists. Still, successfully delivering an email was like 50/50, with no way to confirmation the other party actually got it.
Ive self-hosted my email server since 1999. It started in a closet at home in San Francisco. As things got more restrictive (residential ips being black holes) I moved to a Colo. but now I'm back to hosting it on my server in my cellar. I have a fixed ip from my provider init7 (Switzerland) that has never been blacklisted. Reverse dns is set up. All the acronyms like spf, dkim, dmarc are set up. I have no problems sending to Microsoft and Google email addresses.
So I'm doing it now but I'm ready to switch back to one of my Colo servers at any time and I won't be surprised if I have to at some point.
I do. It's nowhere as hard as everyone on here makes it out to be. And I don't even use an easy solution like Mailcow.
Spam is a solved problem with rspamd, and it's not even an llm
That is the exact problem that got me to abandon my splendidly working, self-hosted email stack. I had so many instances of mail just not getting delivered, despite doing absolutely everything correctly, that I gave up.
Thankfully not a problem we've encountered yet. All my mail is DKIM signed, SPF aligned etc. I also registered on dnswl.org which is a signal quite a few people seem to use.
Personal mailserver sorry. rspamd stops all the sent-using-my-from-address "i hacked you" emails (DMARC drops them) and all the other random spam stuff. I can imagine though a large business with thousands of email accounts it wouldn't be as easy though.
I've been self hosting since 2012 or so and it is a mixed bag. Deliverability is fine provided you're on a clean IP range, which generally only reputable hosts have.
There was a moment when my son was born and he was in NICU that my mail broke. I just went without for a while. Not ideal.
Since then I've thought: self hosting is nice but hosting cooperatively is probably the best way forward. Democratic control might beat technical control. I'll do it soon, I think: I'd be fascinated to know what people think.
Sorry the title should have been "You should self-host your mail server" but it seems HN removes the "You should" in the beginning of a title.
I wanted to start this discussion because I think we are prime for more self hosted mail servers in 2026 and in the post I explain how to use a locally hosted LLM to nudge the spam detector rspamd to whether or not an incoming mail is spam.
Also in times where the EU can order your mail providers to scan for unwanted content [1] (currently limited to CSAM, later probably more) it does feel better to have your data at your hand.
I've tried self-hosting my mail server, but that means all my outgoing mail will go to Spam on all providers that use reputation-based filtering. In all cases I had SPF, DKIM and DMARC working perfectly, PTR records, etc. but it just doesn't matter. Even a Fastmail domain goes right to spam on my personal account, and they are very very established. It's just not worth it.
I use a dedicated server and a vps for this, so I get around the residential IP reputation issue. The rest of the problems with deliverability are overblown. In 15 years of doing it on multiple servers, I've had one 2 month period where Gmail was spamming me and one month where Yahoo spammed me. In both cases it stopped without me changing anything, I've always suspected it's brief periods of anti-competition attempts which don't last forever
I never used residential IPs. Most ISPs don't even let you set PTR records on those. My problem was that any server at practically any provider would reuse an IP that many previous customers have used to send spam in the past. For example you can't hope to send mail from a DigitalOcean IPv4 address without going to spam. Nor from Kamatera. There are probably a few more providers that are basically blackholed because they're so often used for spam. (I don't have experience with providers that don't offer IPv4.)
Man these days it's nearly impossible. Even my web host has trouble hosting email, even though I use it and they do a decent job. Only medium-sized specialist companies and large ones like Gmail do it well. It's just those spammers - we could have nice things like self-hosted email if everyone were nice, but we can't.
I disagree with the author. If you have your own domain for e-mail, then you've already dealt with all risks and vulnerabilities. Of course you have your e-mail stored locally as well by using an e-mail client, which you would anyway.
I was running Postfix+Dovecot+Seive+SpamAssassin+Fail2ban+certbot+spf+dkim+reverse-ip+<other random crap>
It worked! Receiving email was overall pretty easy. I know I also did things the "hard way" by ad-hoccing all that together, and today there are a lot more out-of-the-box solutions that do all that for you. But still. Being a full-time email administrator is a job I will never do again unless I'm getting paid for it.
You know what really sucked? Deliverability. Frequently, emails I would send would just ... vanish ... no warnings, no errors, no failures. From my end, everything was perfect. Until days later, people would follow up with me and say, "Are you going to send that email?" ...
I had a business IP (Comcast Business). The IP address was clean, not black listed anywhere, not on SORBS or other lists. Still, successfully delivering an email was like 50/50, with no way to confirmation the other party actually got it.
So I'm doing it now but I'm ready to switch back to one of my Colo servers at any time and I won't be surprised if I have to at some point.
"spam is solved" looks a lot different at each of those
Another good guide that uses Debian and its standard packages:
* https://workaround.org/ispmail-trixie
(Updated with every release, and upgrade/migration instructions.)
https://www.iredmail.org
https://mailinabox.email/
There was a moment when my son was born and he was in NICU that my mail broke. I just went without for a while. Not ideal.
Since then I've thought: self hosting is nice but hosting cooperatively is probably the best way forward. Democratic control might beat technical control. I'll do it soon, I think: I'd be fascinated to know what people think.
I wanted to start this discussion because I think we are prime for more self hosted mail servers in 2026 and in the post I explain how to use a locally hosted LLM to nudge the spam detector rspamd to whether or not an incoming mail is spam.
Also in times where the EU can order your mail providers to scan for unwanted content [1] (currently limited to CSAM, later probably more) it does feel better to have your data at your hand.
[1] https://en.philenews.com/international/privacy-to-end-in-the...