
Ask HN: Best mail server setup? - paule89
I am currently using zoho for my mails and my domain. But i wanted to host my own mail server. The problem with it is it is just super extensive to setup. 
Isn&#x27;t there an easy to use setup software including everything i need, like imap, spam, encryption and whatnot. 
Also it seems the same software is already used for years. Has nobody come up with a better solution?
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oblib
I used "MAIB" (mail-in-a-box) to setup a mail server on DigitalOcean.

I can't really recommend doing that there, and DigitalOcean advises against it
for some good reasons. There are a lot of "gotchas" involved that require
hoops to jump through to resolve, and they're not just related to
DigitalOcean.

You're pretty much blacklisted by most of the big email providers before you
send your first email because you're "untrusted", and you have to deal with
them on an individual basis.

But, after having it up and running for over a year now and jumping through
those hoops it's pretty awesome. I don't have to worry about my provider
raising their prices, changing their services, or selling out to another
company.

I can have and make as many email accounts as I want and don't have to pay
extra for that, and I've got boilerplate code to integrate with any apps I
make.

MAIB also has a built-in web base email client, and a "Cloud" app, that's
available for each email account. It also has a built-in SSL cert manager that
uses Certbot, and it has a built-in DNS server that I've really grown fond of
and use for all my DNS needs now.

MAIB goes a long way to make it easier to setup and manage, and great
community support, but it's still a fairly extensive ordeal to setup unless
you're already familiar with the processes required to do that, and I wasn't
when I started out.

All that said, I'm glad I did it. For me, it was well worth it.

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sdan
I think I tried this before. Unfortunately I think the problem was that MAIB
wasn't compatible with Ubuntu 16.04

~~~
nik736
You can install Postfix/Dovecot yourself, it's not super hard.

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rwdim
I use postfix / dovecot with postgrey for spam filtering and it does a very
nice job, but I'm sure there is a virtual machine that you can download with
an entire mail setup somewhere....

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mtmail
[https://mailinabox.email/guide.html](https://mailinabox.email/guide.html) has
such a setup.

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ncbrit
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_mail_servers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_mail_servers)

