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

  • TheOneCurly
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    21 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.

    • @james@lemmy.jamesj999.co.uk
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      11 year ago

      Agreed. Sensible to only do the incoming too, I had an outgoing one and it got hijacked because SMTP security seems to default to ‘least secure’. For example if there is a single character out of place in the config file, I found it basically opened everything up rather than reporting an issue :)