I have run my own mail server now for 20+ years. its is runnig postfix , with spamassain. the users have imaps, and roundcube www gui.

It had been running fine, and have been updated HW / OS a lot of time over the years, now its runnig on rocky O/S

  • Feidhlim@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    As someone who has zero experience hosting anything, what are the benefits of doing this?

    Thank you!

    • Trondk@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      Well I didn’t want google to read my mails, and use the content to generate ads, or profiles on me or my family. Besides that it’s keep me up to date on mailserver and mailman . Besides I do it professionally so it was easy

      • Anafroj@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        Well I didn’t want google to read my mails

        Sadly, it only works if no one in the recipients of the mail is on gmail (or if everyone use pgp, which I would tend to think is even more rare).

        I host my own mailserver as well, and I would add as benefits:

        • creating as many email address as you want easily, possibly regexp based address (awesome to give every site a different address and know where the spam comes from, without using the well known schema username+something@host). That also makes routing/filtering mails way more easy, you just have to match the recipient address.
        • delivering mails to software, to put email at the center of interapps messaging (basically, that means that postfix pass a matching email to the executable of your choice on your system instead of storing it in your mailbox)
        • advanced rules for handling emails. When I want to block a spammer that managed to get my real email, I use regexps to match their mails and reject it with a “REJECT 5.1.1 Recipient address rejected: User unknown in local recipient table” error, imitating the error for unknown users, which often triggers a mail system to remove your address from their database
        • easily configure apps to send me email. When I write an application that will send emails to me and only me, I configure it to use my smtp on port 25 without authentication instead of the usual smtps configuration they expect. It connects to it and asks to send a mail to me, which is accepted since I’m a local user. It makes everything way easier (try to do that with gmail and get your IP banned)
        • easy backups. Both of the mail system (I backup the whole sdcard of the pi) and of the emails. Never lose an email again.