Why I Self-Host Everything Except Email

During your self-hosting trip, it is likely that you will try to self-heberger everything you can. I know that is my goal – except one thing: e -mail. I refuse to self-heberge my own email, and here is why I will never do it.

The attraction of all self-hosting

With so many data violations, there is certainly a call to bring everything you can internally. I know that I went on this path, and that I currently put several services to myself for which I counted on other companies.

I associate things for several reasons. The main thing is to save money, because it is cheaper for me to pay the power bill for a server at home than to use dozens of paid services with a bunch of random online companies. But another self-propeller by-product is improved confidentiality that is made by keeping the data on my own equipment.

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Which Homelab is complete without retired corporate equipment?

This led me to try self-hosting almost all services. From cloud storage to a multimedia server, game servers, websites, smart domestic platforms, photo servers and much more. In my self-hosting journey, however, I realized that everything is not really worth self-hosting. Some services simply require too much maintenance and maintenance and are not worth the investment time to operate locally.

So I decided on these few things that I will leave to professionals – professionals who have appropriate data centers (without blocked ports), teams of people to monitor and repair if things decrease, and many servers to keep the services upwards and to do maintenance on hardware or software.

It all includes email … right?

Although I have examined the self-hosting emails, this is something that I have never succeeded.

I am currently paying two emails with Google Workspace, which cost $ 8.40 and $ 16.80 respectively. The self-hosting of my email (and cloud storage) would save me more than $ 300 per year. It gives me a reason to try and self-heberge an email for sure, but I just can’t resolve it to do it.

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Once, I tried to deploy my own messaging server, but I just couldn’t make it work. Often, residential Internet suppliers block e-mail ports, which come out right away. However, my problems – and why I decided not to execute my own messaging server – more deeply.

Email is a self-hosted beast, I don’t want to tame

As I said, I planned to host my own messaging server, but there are a myriad of reasons that I do not have. And I am not alone in this area.

A quick navigation of the R / Auto-Hébergé Sandressé will show many other systems administrators who strongly advise self-hosting email. The reasons vary considerably, but they all concentrate around one thing: it simply does not worth the effort or the hassles.

Some of these people on the Sandressé R / Self-Hébergé are even systems administrators who host and maintain emails on site (self-housing for a company) in their work, and they still do not allow their own email at home.

Some reasons for this come from the port problem I have already mentioned, as well as several others. Incoming emails are relatively easy to configure, as long as your ISP allows this port. However, outgoing emails are quite difficult.

Related

How does emails work?

You send it and receive it every day, it’s instantaneous and it costs nothing.

SMTP is the standard of industry when it comes to sending emails, but the problem is that it can be difficult to configure and work fully. One of the biggest problems is simply to have your emails delivered.

Even if you can make sure that the SMTP server sends emails correctly, and you can operate the port of the port, often unauthorized SMTP servers will be reported in the form of a spam. Indeed, most major messaging companies use spam filtering to send any email that is not a known and documented shipping server directly to spam. Puting your email not to go to spam can be a very big challenge. Another problem related to the question is to filter spam on the incoming side of things.

All of this is added to make emails a beast that I don’t even want to approach. It is already difficult for me to simply operate the emails in self-centered applications which must use Port 465 for SSL / TLS when sending mail, so I cannot imagine how difficult it would be for me to raise a complete messaging server.

Another problem would be reliability. Internet skeletage? No email. Current outrage? Likewise, no email. If my server was broken for any reason, my email would simply stop working. I often count on my email for commercial messaging, so reliability is essential for me.

I just don’t trust my e-mail to be completely reliable if it is self-hosted. I really can’t imagine what would happen if my email was broken while I updated my server, or when my network broke down, or for any other reason. For these reasons, I have never planned to self-heber my own messaging server.

Although I did not host my own email soon, there are a lot of other services that I sit at home. If you are wondering what services I manage at home, here are 10 Docker containers that I personally deployed and that I think each Homelabber should use in its battery of services.