As in this picture, l don’t want to remain a sender/recipient, but an address in itself. So that l can house multiple senders/recipients.
Would that be possible ?
You mean like a new specification? I think some of the mesh network protocols could be interesting if we can scale them up to billions of devices. I bet there is a way to route a few packets of text to an inbox
You can run your own mail servers no problem. Takes about 15 minutes to get going at its simplest level. Now, there’s a whole bunch of problems you’ll run into as soon as you open it to the internet, but that’s a separate topic.
If you just want to use a custom domain: register any domain, find mail host that supports custom domains most do with a paid subscription), and setup your DNS records to point to wherever that service is. No you have mail coming to “beepbopboop@whateverdomainyouregistered.com”
I think the last time when you could do that was 25 or 30 years ago. Nowadays, you’re just going to enter a world of endless pain, suffering and frustration.
You can do it as an experiment if you want to experience how bad it is. Do it on something isolated that you won’t mind setting fire to afterwards.
So actually it’s not as bad as that. I feel like I should write a guide.
Absolutely the hardest part was getting a static IP. More on that in a second.
Exim and dovecot are very, very mature pieces of software. Exim is difficult to configure, but once you get there, it doesn’t ever change. Now that the AI tools have gotten good, you can learn and configure it quite quickly.
For spam- life is so much better with pfsense running pfblocker. Also,bi set up a fail2ban feed to pfblocker to block IPs spamming,brute forcing, or otherwise misbehaving. Much of this already existed in fail2ban and I just have it dump its blocklist to text via a cron job that pfblocker loads.
The good IP is the hard part. For a while I just paid for one, it was about $20 more here for business class Internet that came with an IP. Eventually I cut costs.
You can do this basically two ways. Just get a VPS and install the mail server there, or get a VPS and install opnsense or pfsense there, with a VPN tunnel back home to your mail server. Haproxy handles it and wireguard is really reliable. I did hit a snag here because Google are buttheads and blocked the IP I had - literally no one else does. I actually don’t have too many people who use gmail that I contact so it has only been a tiny problem. But the first IP I had worked perfectly for years.
You need to set up SPF, dkim,certificates etc. But these are just text strings and let’sencrypt…once all set up it just stays that way. Apply updates when released and enjoy your own email server, which is awesome.
I worked in enterprise IT for years, including running mail servers, and ran my own personal servers for my home domains for years. The best feeling ever was outsourcing that responsibility. If you want to do it for fun or learning with a test domain, I’d say go for it. If you want to do this for email that might matter, I would not do that. For an illustration on why, research email delivery and email reputation topics. It’s not that everything is too complex, but you can easily have something to wing without ever knowing and you just lose email.
If you want a good middle lane, I moved my personal domains to mxroute after buying a lifetime plan. I also know and have tested failing over to a second provider if needed. This let’s you make as many accounts and aliases as you want, without dealing with all the delivery issues personally.
It’s possible, but there are so many catches as to be not practical as a daily use thing. Mine is mostly relegated to system notices and similar uses because I wouldn’t rely on it for anything that must get somewhere external.
You can run your own mail server. I generally don’t recommend it, it’s a pain.
You can also host your own domain at somewhere like proton mail, so you have your own @whatever.com
I’m thinking in terms of a mail server. Do you suppose a machine like this would serve the purpose ?
you severely underestimate how big of a project this is. I got into homeservers a few years ago and still dont trust myself to open anything up to the internet. and a mailserver is very likely getting targetted, getting flooded with spam and at the same time has to have good uptime to be useable and practical. I think you should do this: Host something small first, like a PiHole oder AdGuard. Then maybe an arr Stack or Home Assistant. After that Immich/Ente and then a Website. Id you did at least one or two projects I mentionned you will be able to judge for yourself if you are ready for a own mailserver
There’s also the whole that even if you get everything working successfully that when you send mail it ends up in recipients junk mail folders because Google/Microsoft/other big email providers are marking your domain as spam since it’s new and unrecognized.
There’s definitely other ways to achieve getting notifications without going to the extent of a full email server.
Not just your domain because it’s newly registered. Your ISPs entire residential IP block because someone 15 years ago was infected with malware that sent gmail/hotmail some spam. It doesn’t mater how much SPF, DKIM, and DMARC you set up, you’re still blocked.
There is no need for a monitor or graphics card. What kind of processor and memory you need depends on the amount of users you plan to be serving, but if it’s just you and some friends or family I’d say a raspberry pi or clone should be more than enough.
The person you’re replying to is right though, administering your own email server is a pain as you have very little control over which IP address your ISP assigns you and therefore no control over its reputation and chance to end up on spam lists. Also you need to be very aware of security issues in order to prevent your server being used to send out spam. It’s not something I’d recommend to someone who has no experience administering other servers.
If you have never touched a linux command line and played with a Linux server, self-hosting your email server will be too complex and you should start there (by getting a cheap VPS for example).
But if you have a server, a domain name, and some knowledge about self-hosting, there are some easy and FOSS “all in one” solutions like mailcow (https://mailcow.github.io/mailcow-docs/) that bundles all the required software in docker and gives you an admin panel to create mailboxes. It also tells you what DNS records to create and checks if you’ve done it right.
It’s not as hard to manage an email server as many say, just make regular backups to restore if you do break the setup, and don’t worry too much about downtime, generally other servers will keep retrying to send you your emails for quite some time (hours to days) before giving up.
You’ve described me wonderfully in your opening words itself, but you see, l’ve got ```markdown this machine
at hand, and so l wish to put it to some good use.Your machine is not powerful enough to make anything other than very basic setups, but you can always learn some things by installing a Linux distribution, try to learn how to use the command line, maybe install SSH and learn how to connect to your machine remotely.
Main problems with hosting your own mailserver:
- Spam protection is not as good as with hosted options because you just don’t have the same scale of data
- Mail deliverability issues - Generally once you have setup everything (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) on a dedicated IP that is not from a residential ISP, it stays working but sometimes you find out that say live.com/hotmail simply won’t accept your mail and there is nothing you can do.
I do it, it’s not a complicated setup, I don’t even know what mailserver I used whatever Debian recommended (exim or postfix) , dovecot for Server->Recpient. I am a little more paranoid about my server than I would be otherwise (outbound firewall, apparmor profiles for anything that is listening, monit to alert on high CPU usage (anti spam sometimes goes crazy), but not anything that is too much effort (e.g I haven’t gone full hog with SELINUX, etc)
We need to reinvent email. This whole “gmail is the only game in town” thing fucking sucks.
I want a system where I can send and receive files but with an address of my own. And I want to be able to only allow data from a white list without any kind of bypass possibility.
I have been trying in the past to do this myself but I stopped for the following reasons:
- what happens if your internet connection is lost while someone sends you an email? It probably will not reach your mailbox. If you host it on a private internet connection, it might drop now and then (ISP updates your modem at night, you need to turn off the electricity, etc)
- its complicated.
- mail is crucial for me. It needs to be 100% reliable.
I ended up buying a domain name and hooking it up to a premium email service (fastmail, but there are plenty others).
- what happens if your internet connection is lost while someone sends you an email?
On this point, mail servers will retry for a period, usually 24 hours, before reporting back to the sender that they couldn’t deliver.
I’ll confirm everything everyone else said. Hosting your own email server is a major pain in the ass for many unrelated reasons. The mail stack is complex. You need to do a whole bunch of things right to avoid your setup from getting flagged as spam. You need to secure it real well. Hosting it at home is likely to be almost impossible because it is very common for residential internet subscriptions to have the required ports blocked, and the ISPs will very often refuse to open them for you even if you have a nice static IP. Getting around that is not gonna be easy.
There’s a reason why so many ardent homelabbers refuse to touch email hosting with a 10 foot pole.
What you’re describing is just email.
Yes, you can host an email server.
Maybe what you’re asking is if this can be done within a private network, so you wouldn’t need to buy a domain and set up dns and all. The answer is again yes, but it wouldn’t be much good. Either both servers are on the same LAN, or they each have a static IP that is known and trusted by the other. In both cases there are much better ways to communicate than email.
