Mail-in-a-Box does everything for me or tells me what I need to do.
I’d been annoyed at my emails ending up in spam but chalked it up to the perils of self-hosting. A couple weeks ago I decided to look into it and found in the admin panel, all the params I needed to add to my DNS records for DKIM, SPF, and more.
I want to figure out how to create a similar package for JMAP.
if I may lose my server and lose some important email
This is the biggest problem I have with most of the “host your own {x}”. Yes, I have to do maintenance, yes things may break. I can probably even deal with spam. I ran my own email a few times. As a secondary server though.
Because hosting means I need to have a looooong term backup&recovery strategy. Unless Google goes bust, I’m pretty certain I’ll be able to read an email from 2004 or 2005 or whenever it was I’ve switched to gmail.
And some of my blog attempts I can’t even find on the internet archive, let alone mails film that server. Or photos. Or whatever. I don’t even know what will happen in 10 or 20 years.
I’m curious as to how do people deal with that issue? Okay, having a newsletter from 2004 is probably my hoarding impulse problem and the inability to go back and clean it up now is just making it worse. Probably the same with the 100gb of photos I have (again, needs cleanup and only 30% are the everyday smartphone snaps).
What’s your strategy? What are your ultra long term backup and recovery plans?
What will you do if you give up on computers in 10 years?
What’s your strategy? What are your ultra long term backup and recovery plans?
ZFS. Mirroring. A pair of 4tb drives is not prohibitively expensive in this age.
Periodic snapshots.
One offsite backup, in case of earthquakes,fires,etc. Lots of ways to do this. Could be aws glacier or similar. Or a third drive hosted at a workplace (if allowed) or at a friend’s or relative’s house. In the latter case, zfs send/recv.
What will you do if you give up on computers in 10 years?
My drives will keep in a closet if I decide to run off and live in the woods for a few years. Google data will not, if you stop paying the google bill.
And upgrade plan. While setting everything up is fun as you learn some things, upgrading software and hardware will quickly become a chore.
That’s why I avoid owning any server as much as I can.
just keeping up with the maintenance is too much hassle for me to host anything on my own if I think it’s somewhat important. Imagine going on vacation for two weeks without a notebook to fix your mail server because it went down for whatever reason.
I use isync/mbsync. My personal email archive dating back to 2001 seems to be about 3.4GB, so I just download every mail I’ve ever received to all my devices. That’s mirroring taken care of. PCs and laptops need to be backed up anyway, so that’s backups taken care of. This strategy will work if your mail archive is 0.3, 30 or 300GB.
I’m pretty certain I’ll be able to read an email from 2004 or 2005 or whenever it was I’ve switched to gmail.
Mail is probably safe because the storage costs are negligable. But I wonder how long Google will allow people to store photos and video on their servers for free.
You might also want to think about a secondary MX - if you’re running this on a single machine/instance something is eventually going to go wrong. Most of the time sending MXs will just retry later, but if you’re running this for other people, you’ll want somewhere for mail to go during outages of your primary (and you’ll also want to protect the secondary the same way you protect the primary)
Same here, but for twenty years. I started out with sendmail (and reading mail on the server via elm) but now I run Postfix (and read email on the server via mutt). The only spam filter in place is a greylist daemon I wrote, and it stops 50% of all spam (of the rest, 45% is addressed to my registrar address, which used to be public, and the remaining 5% I can deal with).
I’ve been using Mailu for years without major issue. iRedmail before that with issues on upgrades and Sovereign before that with even more issues on upgrades.
This was after running Postfix and Dovecot for years somewhat clunkily.
The thing with these packages is that they contain an awful lot of magic. If you’re comfortable with that, then go ahead. I’m fortunate enough in that I understand Mailu’s stack pretty well (it’s a fairly common setup), or at least well enough to go back to Postfix and Dovecot if they stopped maintaining it.
Mail Backups are fairly easy, just set up Borgmatic, point at your mailu folders and you’re mostly done. If you need to start from scratch, copy the mail folders back in, recreate the accounts and the mail is there. You could go further and have full db backups etc if you want, but I’ve restarted several times with Mailu and found folder recovery enough for me.
I stopped hosting my own mail servers in the beginning of the year. Main reason was not so well working spam filtering. It’s easier to filter spam when you have a wider base of users because you can train the filters better. Also from time to time you have to deal with providers handling mails in uncommon ways (because their administrators are trying to be smart). So it takes some time for configuration and maintenance for a thing I’m not really deep into.
But I learned a lot about SMTP, Imap and how e-mails work in general.
As I do in every thread about mail server hosting, I will mention that the NixOS-based “simple-nixos-mailserver” has worked ideally for me. Haven’t touched it in two years except to add users.
Mail-in-a-Box does everything for me or tells me what I need to do.
I’d been annoyed at my emails ending up in spam but chalked it up to the perils of self-hosting. A couple weeks ago I decided to look into it and found in the admin panel, all the params I needed to add to my DNS records for DKIM, SPF, and more.
I want to figure out how to create a similar package for JMAP.
Mail-in-a-Box, for those who haven’t checked it out yet: https://mailinabox.email/
Another “batteries included” solution that holds your hand is Mailcow: https://github.com/mailcow/mailcow-dockerized/
This is the biggest problem I have with most of the “host your own {x}”. Yes, I have to do maintenance, yes things may break. I can probably even deal with spam. I ran my own email a few times. As a secondary server though.
Because hosting means I need to have a looooong term backup&recovery strategy. Unless Google goes bust, I’m pretty certain I’ll be able to read an email from 2004 or 2005 or whenever it was I’ve switched to gmail.
And some of my blog attempts I can’t even find on the internet archive, let alone mails film that server. Or photos. Or whatever. I don’t even know what will happen in 10 or 20 years.
I’m curious as to how do people deal with that issue? Okay, having a newsletter from 2004 is probably my hoarding impulse problem and the inability to go back and clean it up now is just making it worse. Probably the same with the 100gb of photos I have (again, needs cleanup and only 30% are the everyday smartphone snaps).
What’s your strategy? What are your ultra long term backup and recovery plans?
What will you do if you give up on computers in 10 years?
ZFS. Mirroring. A pair of 4tb drives is not prohibitively expensive in this age.
Periodic snapshots.
One offsite backup, in case of earthquakes,fires,etc. Lots of ways to do this. Could be aws glacier or similar. Or a third drive hosted at a workplace (if allowed) or at a friend’s or relative’s house. In the latter case, zfs send/recv.
My drives will keep in a closet if I decide to run off and live in the woods for a few years. Google data will not, if you stop paying the google bill.
As a reminder, SMR is still a problem, and even more so with a ZFS setup.
It’s not possible to just buy a pair of a 4TB drive. Extra effort is needed to avoid SMR.
Tarsnap
And upgrade plan. While setting everything up is fun as you learn some things, upgrading software and hardware will quickly become a chore. That’s why I avoid owning any server as much as I can.
Oh yes I totally forgot to mention maintenance and upgrades. These days the things like that are commodity.
just keeping up with the maintenance is too much hassle for me to host anything on my own if I think it’s somewhat important. Imagine going on vacation for two weeks without a notebook to fix your mail server because it went down for whatever reason.
I’ve embraced the impermanence of everything. I delete most mail I get. Not archive, trash and it gets auto-cleaned there.
I use isync/mbsync. My personal email archive dating back to 2001 seems to be about 3.4GB, so I just download every mail I’ve ever received to all my devices. That’s mirroring taken care of. PCs and laptops need to be backed up anyway, so that’s backups taken care of. This strategy will work if your mail archive is 0.3, 30 or 300GB.
Mail is probably safe because the storage costs are negligable. But I wonder how long Google will allow people to store photos and video on their servers for free.
Been using mailcow for a few years now, it’s great!
You might also want to think about a secondary MX - if you’re running this on a single machine/instance something is eventually going to go wrong. Most of the time sending MXs will just retry later, but if you’re running this for other people, you’ll want somewhere for mail to go during outages of your primary (and you’ll also want to protect the secondary the same way you protect the primary)
You are right, that is something that should be added to considerations, I will edit the post with your recommendation.
I’ve been running my own mail server for something like 15 years, been pretty happy with it. Used to be on dovecot+postfix, now on dovecot+OpenSMTPd.
It’s been pretty painless.
Same here, but for twenty years. I started out with sendmail (and reading mail on the server via elm) but now I run Postfix (and read email on the server via mutt). The only spam filter in place is a greylist daemon I wrote, and it stops 50% of all spam (of the rest, 45% is addressed to my registrar address, which used to be public, and the remaining 5% I can deal with).
I’ve been using Mailu for years without major issue. iRedmail before that with issues on upgrades and Sovereign before that with even more issues on upgrades.
This was after running Postfix and Dovecot for years somewhat clunkily.
The thing with these packages is that they contain an awful lot of magic. If you’re comfortable with that, then go ahead. I’m fortunate enough in that I understand Mailu’s stack pretty well (it’s a fairly common setup), or at least well enough to go back to Postfix and Dovecot if they stopped maintaining it.
Mail Backups are fairly easy, just set up Borgmatic, point at your mailu folders and you’re mostly done. If you need to start from scratch, copy the mail folders back in, recreate the accounts and the mail is there. You could go further and have full db backups etc if you want, but I’ve restarted several times with Mailu and found folder recovery enough for me.
Yes, what I liked about them is that is just open source software.
I stopped hosting my own mail servers in the beginning of the year. Main reason was not so well working spam filtering. It’s easier to filter spam when you have a wider base of users because you can train the filters better. Also from time to time you have to deal with providers handling mails in uncommon ways (because their administrators are trying to be smart). So it takes some time for configuration and maintenance for a thing I’m not really deep into. But I learned a lot about SMTP, Imap and how e-mails work in general.
As I do in every thread about mail server hosting, I will mention that the NixOS-based “simple-nixos-mailserver” has worked ideally for me. Haven’t touched it in two years except to add users.
https://gitlab.com/simple-nixos-mailserver/nixos-mailserver/-/wikis/A-Complete-Setup-Guide
Seconded – this module is wonderful, and makes server installation almost braindead easy aside from DNS.