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

  • @Lichtblitz@discuss.tchncs.de
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    fedilink
    English
    31 year ago

    Self hosting email is not difficult. This has been true in the past but with modern standards and tools it’s much easier now. It just takes a few hours/days and some dedication to get right. There are free services that test your mail server and can receive your emails and tell you exactly what’s amiss. I completely changed my mail server and software and got perfect scores in around two to three evenings tinkering around. Granted, I had some experience from the last time around ten years ago. This will likely hold up again for the next ten years as long as I update my software somewhat regularly. And my emails were never bounced/rejected apart from the very beginning of my journey.