Yes, and I love it.
I use mailjet as a proxy on outgoing emails so that I get fewer of my sent messages rejected, which works.
It was a pain to setup but it's treating me very well.
this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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a bit late to the party here, but I didnt see iRedmail mentioned. been using this to host my own email on a VPS for a little over a year now and its great. for me its worth, you can absolutely make it secure, and its not stupid to run it off a local computer. unfortunately most ISPs make it insanely difficult to host on your home network.
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there are many replies saying similar things, but don't be discouraged from try it out. i host my own with mailinabox on a vm from a cloud provider. no spam issues. the only wildcard was spending a few months getting my ip address off google's spam filters. it is so worth it, i own my own email/calendar/contacts/notes/todo list/ AND website solution. all with mailinabox. completely disconnected from google etc.
Did you ever manage to get off hotmail/outlook spam filters? I ran my own server for years and had no issues with gmail, but was never able to reliably send to hotmail. That was the nail in the coffin in the end as so many businesses I communicate with were on outlook and my mail would always goto spam causing endless issues.
yes i did. through mxtoolbox(iirc) i learned what blacklists my ip was on. and it wasnt my IP, but my ip block. it was just a matter of filing online requests to have my Ip removed from these lists. With google, i had to have a google account and login and pinky-swear that i would not send spam, and it got me off that list. google was really the most difficult to find info for. beware though, there are some places that say if you pay them, they will get you off the list. don't believe it. it is free or its a scam
I did for a couple years, but moved to mailbox.org a while ago. The effort was much to high to save a few bucks and there is no real upside to it. E-Mail is a troublesome mixture of different protocols from the internet stone age held together by chewing gum (SMTP, POP3, IMAP, DNS, database or file storage, maybe ActiveSync, Web-Mailer, ...)
Even when everything is up and running there is always maintenance to keep your SSL certificates up to date, update your incoming spam filter technique, keep other mail providers assured that you are not spamming (DKIM, etc.), keep all the different system services (see above) up to date and interoperable, etc. and every few years when you want to move to a new server, provider or Linux distro you start it all over again.
Damn, it is so bizarre that email of all things would be the least operable by tech savvy individuals. Someone linked an article that explains it, and it truly is depressing. Like, it makes me not want to even have email... which is not really possible if I want to be employed. Eh, it's not like I DON'T already have free email accounts, I just don't always like the decision my provider makes.
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I did but I stopped. My server had everything set up (DKIM, DMARC, SPF, Spam filtering) but I gave up after some providers wanted me to jump through hoops to get my mail delivered. Also I never had enough outgoing mail to build some reputation.
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I originally did but the maintenance burden was killing me. Then last year Proton unified their subscription with VPN and Mail (also upgrading my Proton VPN only subscription to Proton plus) and from there I decided to just go all in on Proton mail. I integrated my domain to Proton mail and never looked back.
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Not likely worth it. Primary reason is that the large federated email services are skeptic also of email from services such as your proposed self hosting solution and may simply not deliver the mail you send. This is to mitigate against spammers setting up a bespoke servers.
There are a bunch of other things that could go wrong if you don’t set everything up perfectly, but even if you do, this would be a big problem.
Better off using a custom domain with a big provider. Fewer headaches. I like Fastmail, but many others are great too.
I originally did but the maintenance burden was killing me. Then last year Proton unified their subscription with VPN and Mail (also upgrading my Proton VPN only subscription to Proton plus) and from there I decided to just go all in on Proton mail. I integrated my domain to Proton mail and never looked back.
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Your own email server requires near 100% uptime or you risk not receiving critical emails. If a remote email server is trying to contact your email server and it can't it's only going to retry a few times and then give up. Hosting this yourself sounds great until you realize high uptime is not cheap and requires constant attention.
Setting it up securely can be difficult depending on your understanding of server infrastructure as well as protocols like DNS. You need to set up SPF, DKIM, DMARC, etc in order to prevent someone from faking an email from your server.
Of course, federated email does not use SPF/DKIM/DMARC because the whole point is that someone from another server could use your server to send an email (hence the federation). Open email servers were common 20 years ago but very rare today. That makes setup easier, but the main caveat is that most known non-federated email servers will reject email from servers that don't have SPF/DKIM/DMARC because they generally end up being havens for bots and spam since there is no verification or authenticity of the sender.
As someone who self hosts a lot of things, I would never self host my email. If i did I would be paying for two boxes in different parts of the world on different ISPs to provide that uptime. I would definitely set it up securely and not as a federated server otherwise it would be practically unusable for day to day emails.
This is disingenuous on many counts.
A mail server does not require 100% uptime. The only messages you would miss from a brief downtime would be from a bad behaving mail sender. Even if your server was down for a day you likely wouldn't miss any mail, if it was longer than 24 hours you might start missing some.
SPF is all that's really needed to prevent someone from faking mail from your domain, if it's set to strict most mail providers will reject fake/spoofed mail at this point. This let's the receiving mail server know which servers/IP Addresses are allowed to send mail for the domain.
DKIM - before sending an email your server will create a signature and add it as a header. The DKIM DNS record stores the public key so the receiving mail server can verify the email's authenticity.
DMARC - Largely I only ever get reports from Google. MS and others rarely send them. Anyway, this is basically a tool that alerts you that unauthorized emails are being sent from your domain. If this happens, likely your SPF record is incorrect.
There are tools to help make sure your setup is correct, such as this https://mxtoolbox.com/SPFRecordGenerator.aspx
The rest of your comment contains outdated information. This post is about running a mail server in 2023. Some anecdotal statements about what it might have been like to run a mail server 20+ years ago serve no purpose here other than to scare people off from trying to host their own mail. If you succeed in that at least we could continue to sit around whining that Google and Microsoft have email all locked up and us little guys can't do anything about it but to continue to regurgitate how hard it is and you just shouldn't even try.
Your own email server requires near 100% uptime or you risk not receiving critical emails.
I disagree. You can take some amount of downtime without issue.
https://wpmailsmtp.com/docs/how-to-automatically-resend-a-failed-email/ as an example for some services.
Many services (including postfix by default) will attempt a number of resend operations before it gives up.
Of course, federated email does not use SPF/DKIM/DMARC because the whole point is that someone from another server could use your server to send an email (hence the federation).
What? All email is federated. What are you talking about here? SPF/DKIM/DMARC are on top of email... and have nothing to do with the federated property of email. Federation does not mean that you login or use another server. But that you have your instance, and the servers hash out the cross communication amongst themselves. That's EXACTLY what email servers do using SMTP.
I would definitely set it up securely and not as a federated server otherwise it would be practically unusable for day to day emails.
If your email wasn't federated then you would get emails from anyone outside of your own instance. That would make email useless for 99% of the world.
I take "federated email" to refer to a juxtaposition with normal email implementation which harkens back to how it was in the 90s or early 00s where you didn't need to be registered on many SMTP servers in order to use it and it's stripped of server-side validation. There's some discussion on this topic in the fediverse.
You're right that the default current implementation is already federated.