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AudioGames.net Forum → Developers room → Interested in setting up an email server
I've recently gotten back into playing around with a VPS. I've pointed a domain to it and have been experimenting with some web dev stuff. I'm especially interested in setting up an email account with my domain. What software/resources should I look into for this?
Postfix as an MTA, Dovecot as an IMAP/POP server.
Just gonna way in here real quick, before you hurt yourself.
Unless you really need to do this, and or have far too much time on your hands, just don't. Seriously. You will spend far more time begging and pleading with it to work than you will actually getting any sort of enjoyment out of it. If you want email for your domain, Gandi is an excellent choice, they include that as part of their default DNS.
I have to disagree with 3 on this one. For a couple reasons:
1. Self-hosted emails on your domain means that you don't have to pay anything for users. Just space and system resources. So that means no extra costs for you.
2. You can completely avoid the risk of inaccessible webmail interfaces or anything like that.
It does have downsides. If you mess it up you can screw yourself and get yourself blacklisted. However, I'd highly recommend the awesome self-hosted list for complete email solutions that you can deploy. Then all you have to do is configure DNS, and the solutions you use usually come with all the records you need. Before actually using your email anywhere though, check with tools like mxtester and such to verify that you've got everything set up properly.
+1
Yes, especially that he might want to learn how to operate a mailserver. There's no use in discouraging.
@4 oo, that's useful indeed. That would definitely take a lot of the, er, frustrating anger out of the equation, however you do still have the problem of the rest of the world pretty much hating your email server. I ran my own server for about 6 or 7 months last year, and when it worked it worked brilliantly, but when it didn't it, well, didn't. Granted I tend to use either thunderbird or outlook, depending on the system in question, so choice of webmail isn't so much of an issue for me, although with Gandi, at least, you don't exactly have that problem since you can see, and thus do things with, the DNS records used for email. I believe you have something like 25 GB of storage for free, and you can pay for a few little extras like more storage and perhaps something else, though I've personally never had need of it.
Thanks for the advice, everyone. I only want to explore this as a side project, not a replacement for my primary email; at least, not until I'd be advanced in it (which of course would take quite some time).
I'll look into everything that has been mentioned thus far.
Learning new thing is always good.
Oh man! I remember the days of hosting my own email server. Not fun! It is a cool learning experience, but it was quite an adventure. But to set it up right, you need to go through all the configs for Dovecot, Postfix, TLS, and so much more. Technically you can work with these pieces of software out of the box, but definitely will get your emails blacklisted as spam. It definitely makes you appreciate these hosted solutions even more.
And even after setting it up, you have to maintain the setup as software can change, and updates can break your configurations.
Go through it to learn, be my guest, but I personally would get a GSuite email. Or, better yet, a cheap email on something like namecheap.
Another solution with VPS is MailInABox, which I think is still around. It's essentially an email suite you can deploy on your systems, and it will update itself when it needs to. Kind of a cool solution, but it doesn't really teach you much in the long run. It's almost still easier to just go with cheap email hosting.
I've been reading through some resources and don't know I have the patience for this right now, lol. I might just play around with some things but ultimately leave it up to an email hosting service.
You get gsuite for $6 a month or something, they give you a set of domain records, and you add them. Gets expensive for more than one user pretty fast, but you can access it from most e-mail clients, it's maintenance free, it gives you [email protected], and you can just forget about it for literally years at a time as long as your card is set up to auto-charge and such. Thiss doesn't even need a vps.
My primary e-mail is using ahicks.io, and as long as I don't screw up domain renewal it'll work forever with no input for like $50 a year.
There are probably other services like it, if you're not a Google person; you can point your mx records at anything.
Thanks for the recommendation. I'm also interested in something that might have calendar support. That might be stretching it, but just an afterthought.
GSuite also has calendar. It's basically branded Google Apps. Calendar, Drive, Sheets, Docs, their power point thing, drive, meet, and a few others for that price.
Oh I see. When I'm more awake I'll look into that. Outlook doesn't natively support Google calendar to my knowledge, but I'll still check it out.
I mean, you can always set up NextCloud plus mailserver
AudioGames.net Forum → Developers room → Interested in setting up an email server
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