Is it useful to have your own mail server as a non-business? Just a private person. Configure SMTP and IMAP for it, sync with outlook I think.
Yay or nay, waste of time? What are your thoughts?
No.
I would say absolutely not.
The biggest problem you’ll run into is sending email from your residential internet connection. Most, if not all, residential ISPs either 100% block or severely throttle port 25 outbound traffic to cut down on spam. Even if you’re able to find an ISP that doesn’t block 25 outbound, if the reverse zone lookup indicates that it’s a residential ISP most spam filtering solutions are going to flag all of your messages as spam.
I heard that it is a thing you most likely do not want to have set up
For yourself as an experiment sure, but don’t fuck around with your family’s email.
I’ve hosted my own email for 2 years now. Using proxmox mail gateway on a 5€ hetzner VPS. it relays mail to my mail server which I host at home. I’ve dealt with my home public IP changing every now and then with 2 simple scripts. SPF, DKIM, DMARC is all set up.
All in all, it’s relatively low maintenance. PMG makes a good job filtering all the crap and I have yet to receive and actual spam in my inbox (I only had a couple false positives).
I documented the whole setup, can share if you want.
Been hosting my own email for over 20yrs. Get a vps at some reputable hoster, and make this a dedicated mailserver. Be sure to setup all dns records that are required, and rollout antispam measures.
I’m running my own over 20 years now. For my own domains and catch all and temporary email address. For very long time temp email was not available commercialy. Now we have simple login, I think Firefox has something similar and few others. I would say it pretty self sufficient, no need to tinker when all is set up. I have always been exim user and I only know exim. The only pain I have now is that let’s encrypt certificate gets renewed every 3 months and exim is unable to read it, so I need to fix permissions. The bonus point and weired flex is the ability to read email via telnet to port 110 and sending email chatting to the server on port 25 lol
“is it recommended” implies that the wisdom of crowds (a) exists, b) applies, c) is correct.
What do YOU want to do? That’s all that matters.
I’ve run my own mail server for over 20 years. I enjoy it, and its nice having my mail sit in my basement.
I once set one up on a raspberry pi. It was compromised in about 5 minutes.
Microsoft 365 paid is so cheap, it isn’t funny. I’d do that.
Always fun to do if learning but in production even for personal i would recommend you pay for something like startmail or mailfence and use their custom domain features.
i learned exchange on my own and even had dreams of doing multi tenant exchange until exchange online came and jerked off all over that dream
I’ve run my own mail server for over 15 years. If you’re going to do it, put it on a VM at a reliable cloud provider, such as AWS. You wouldn’t want your email to go down while you’re on vacation for a week with no way of fixing it. You need to make sure you use a static IP that you keep forever, because your mail server builds reputation and the IP must not have any reputation of spam that has landed it on block lists.
It’s not difficult if you let reuse someone else’s hard work to make it secure and keep it updated. This project is fantastic: https://mailinabox.email/
Would I recommend it? It’s more rational to bring your own domain to have it hosted by Microsoft or Google, but doing it yourself is more fun and flexible, and possibly cheaper depending on how many users and domains you will be hosting.
If you’re planning to run for political office, I’d recommend against it. /s
How many of you all here, using a hosted solution remembered to setup DKIM on their custom domain? hostname alignment can aid in email deliverability, i believe.
For reference, if you were using office365 you would take the steps outlined here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/security/office-365-security/email-authentication-dkim-configure?view=o365-worldwide
Lastly… if you don’t bother, any good reason to skip the domain alignment step?