<story><title>Ask HN: Why can&apos;t I host my own email?</title><text>I can host my own Mastodon server, or all kinds of other novelty &amp;#x2F; fun things which don&amp;#x27;t seem easily decentralized.&lt;p&gt;Email feels like one of the most decentralized internet concepts, and ironically it&amp;#x27;s seemingly the one thing I &lt;i&gt;can&amp;#x27;t&lt;/i&gt; self-host unless, from what I&amp;#x27;ve heard, I enjoy being permanently marked as spam &amp;#x2F; blacklisted. What&amp;#x27;s going on? How do we fix this?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>azinman2</author><text>My issue with fast mail et all is storage is so unnecessarily expensive. I have many gigs of email that I don’t want to lose, but I also don’t want to pay many tens of dollars&amp;#x2F;month to host it.</text></item><item><author>wpietri</author><text>Yup. Spam is the root problem. With an enormous amount of complexity between that and the mail admin&amp;#x27;s day to day experience.&lt;p&gt;I hosted my own mail for more than 20 years. A couple years back I just got tired of trying to solve deliverability puzzles, plus the fears that deliverability issues generate. (E.g., &amp;quot;Did that potential employer get my email about the job?&amp;quot;) Especially since some of the puzzles are not solvable, like why GMail does what it does. I even had friends at Google, and I still couldn&amp;#x27;t find out why GMail occasionally didn&amp;#x27;t like my server. And arguably, that&amp;#x27;s the right choice for them, as the more spammers know about how they work, the worse it is for Google staff and GMail users.&lt;p&gt;For me, switching to Fastmail hosting was a big win. It&amp;#x27;s not like I&amp;#x27;m out of technical challenges to solve, but I get to apply that to things where the upside is greater than, &amp;quot;The thing everybody expects to work still works.&amp;quot;</text></item><item><author>zcdziura</author><text>The problem is that spam was&amp;#x2F;is so bad that extreme measures were taken to curb it. There are all kinds of invisible forces that you abutt that can be difficult to figure out, such as IP blacklists and the like. And even if you set everything up properly and host your email with a responsible host, Microsoft will still mark your mail as spam.&lt;p&gt;I host my own email server with Vultr on an OpenBSD VM using OpenSMTPD and Dovecot, relaying all outbound mail through SMTP2Go (their free tier more than meets my needs). I have all of the necessary DNS entries set to mark my mail as legit, and I sign all outgoing mail using strong 2048-bit RSA keys. Thus far, I&amp;#x27;m able to send mail and not have it marked as spam (at least to everyone that I&amp;#x27;ve corresponded with thus far). It was a lot of work to get to that point, but not terrible.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>maccolgan</author><text>I use SES just for delivering emails while hosting the emails myself. Feels like an optimal solution.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: Why can&apos;t I host my own email?</title><text>I can host my own Mastodon server, or all kinds of other novelty &amp;#x2F; fun things which don&amp;#x27;t seem easily decentralized.&lt;p&gt;Email feels like one of the most decentralized internet concepts, and ironically it&amp;#x27;s seemingly the one thing I &lt;i&gt;can&amp;#x27;t&lt;/i&gt; self-host unless, from what I&amp;#x27;ve heard, I enjoy being permanently marked as spam &amp;#x2F; blacklisted. What&amp;#x27;s going on? How do we fix this?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>azinman2</author><text>My issue with fast mail et all is storage is so unnecessarily expensive. I have many gigs of email that I don’t want to lose, but I also don’t want to pay many tens of dollars&amp;#x2F;month to host it.</text></item><item><author>wpietri</author><text>Yup. Spam is the root problem. With an enormous amount of complexity between that and the mail admin&amp;#x27;s day to day experience.&lt;p&gt;I hosted my own mail for more than 20 years. A couple years back I just got tired of trying to solve deliverability puzzles, plus the fears that deliverability issues generate. (E.g., &amp;quot;Did that potential employer get my email about the job?&amp;quot;) Especially since some of the puzzles are not solvable, like why GMail does what it does. I even had friends at Google, and I still couldn&amp;#x27;t find out why GMail occasionally didn&amp;#x27;t like my server. And arguably, that&amp;#x27;s the right choice for them, as the more spammers know about how they work, the worse it is for Google staff and GMail users.&lt;p&gt;For me, switching to Fastmail hosting was a big win. It&amp;#x27;s not like I&amp;#x27;m out of technical challenges to solve, but I get to apply that to things where the upside is greater than, &amp;quot;The thing everybody expects to work still works.&amp;quot;</text></item><item><author>zcdziura</author><text>The problem is that spam was&amp;#x2F;is so bad that extreme measures were taken to curb it. There are all kinds of invisible forces that you abutt that can be difficult to figure out, such as IP blacklists and the like. And even if you set everything up properly and host your email with a responsible host, Microsoft will still mark your mail as spam.&lt;p&gt;I host my own email server with Vultr on an OpenBSD VM using OpenSMTPD and Dovecot, relaying all outbound mail through SMTP2Go (their free tier more than meets my needs). I have all of the necessary DNS entries set to mark my mail as legit, and I sign all outgoing mail using strong 2048-bit RSA keys. Thus far, I&amp;#x27;m able to send mail and not have it marked as spam (at least to everyone that I&amp;#x27;ve corresponded with thus far). It was a lot of work to get to that point, but not terrible.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>selcuka</author><text>&amp;gt; I have many gigs of email
&amp;gt; don’t want to pay many tens of dollars&amp;#x2F;month&lt;p&gt;How many gigs? It appears that the 100GB plan is only $9&amp;#x2F;mo.</text></comment>