I know the adage that self-hosting email is hard. I use a third party smtp server to send emails for my Lemmy instance in order to guarantee delivery, for example.

However, other than potential uptime, what are the disadvantages to setting up self-hosted incoming email?

Incoming email is like 99% of my email usage. I’m happy to use a third party mail provider for outgoing email, but don’t see why I shouldn’t simply host incoming email myself.

Thank you <3

  • avalanche@kbin.social
    2·
    1 year ago

    Worth it for me. I have the freedom of hosting as many domains, accounts, and aliases but no extra charges. If you only have yourself, simple needs, and care less about holding your own data, maybe it is not worth it. It all depends.
    I also would not say it is “easy”. It is if you already know what to do, but you can say that about a lot of things. And mailcow makes it all “easier”, but when something breaks, it is often not at the best time to figure things out.
    I get less spam on this setup then I did with Google. I owe much of that to greylisting, which is very effective, but not everyone’s cup of tea.
    My biggest problem over the years is delivery failure due to various written and unwritten rules. Some people here will say you just have to have a clean IP, but it is NOT that simple when dealing with Google and MS. In the end, I use Sendgrid for my outgoing. We send so little mail, we will always be in their free tier. I’d rather not use them, but it is better than giving up on selfhosting for me.
    And finally, if you are not going to bake in backup and recovery into your plans, don’t bother. Make that aspect of your buildout equally important.

  • TheOneCurly@lemmy.theonecurly.pageEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Most people complain about spam. I think you’ll be surprised just how much incoming spam you get and how hard it is to sort though it. Not to say it’s not worth doing, but that’ll be the hard part.

  • Moonrise2473@feddit.itEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    The main drawback is having your ip address bound to your domain, which with a whois can equal to your name and address

    Maybe i’m just paranoid, spoiled by cloudflare protection

  • binwiederhier@discuss.ntfy.shEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    I hosted my incoming mail for years with a minimal postfix config that would just relay to Gmail. That got me individual email addresses per service (e.g. grubhub@mydomain.com, …) that I could turn off when a service got annoying.

    It worked wonderfully without issues for years. And by years i mean 8-10 years!

    Recently, 11 months ago, i noticed that some mails were not relayed anymore, and i ultimately switched to Cloudflare for that feature. You can read more about that here: https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/vqk4j9/mail_relay_as_a_service_moving_away_from/

    That said, if you only want to store the incoming mail, I don’t think you’ll have issues beyond spam, a lot of spam.

    Good luck.