
Ask HN: Running your own Private E-Mail server - dangerface
At the moment I am just using gmail, but I&#x27;m fed up with the amount of snooping google does, I want my email to be private again (if it ever was).<p>I have considered a privacy focused provider like Lavabit or Hushmail, but are they really private or just a marketing gimmick? If their efforts are legit, does this not just make them a target for NSA etc? For $50 a year, Im not convinced.<p>For that sort of money I would rather get my own vps and setup a truly private email server.<p>Has anyone tried this? I looked at qmailtoaster and some other off the shelf scripts but couldent get a decent setup. I have setup a postfix + clamav + spamassasin + dovecot and so on, but its a lot of work and not something I look forward to doing, is there a better alternative?
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mtmail
The question of running your own mail server comes up every couple of months.
To quote the top comment on one of the threads "I run my own mail
infrastructure. To say the least I wouldn't recommend it even to my worst
enemies."
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16238937](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16238937),
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16674320](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16674320)

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informatimago
You can do it easily enough. I wouldn't advice a VPS, but instead a dedicated
server. Even better: have it at your own home or office! You only need a fixed
IP address for that. (Already a majority of systems on the Internet are using
IPv6, soon you'll easily have fixed IP addresses, because you'll be working
only in IPv6.)

Now, the administrative workload of maintaining a mail server is not enormous,
but it's bothering, since it looks like the big mail companies keep inventing
new systems and protocols (to "fight spam" so they say), so you would have to
track all those new stuff and update your configuration.

Basically, talking to other fellow programmers with postfix is easy; talking
to customers who use gmail is harder; talking to accountants and bankers who
use Microsoft Outlook is hard. You will also have to configure imap and smtp
with SSL/TSL (thankfully, nowadays there's letsencrypt.org to provide
certificates for free).

And clamav or spamassassin are direly inefficient at modern spam filtering
AFAICS. If you want spam-free email, it's Sisyphe-like fight every day.

So it's possible, but you will have to attend to problems from time to time,
and it will hard to reach the same level of "quality" as gmail. On the other
hand, if you run your email server at home, (or on a dedicated server at a
trustable hosting), and use SSL/TLS for all your email connections (smtp-smtp
and imap), then you will be able to exchange email in a private and secure way
between other people doing the same. Of course, this will be lost as soon as
somebody in the mail list is on gmail, or forward to somebody on gmail...

I'd say it's worth it, but it is a little tiring. For example, last month I
had to spend a week changing courier-imap for dovecot, just because an update
of courier-imap on my debian system broke sasl authentication. This kind of
thing tend to occur at the worst time. But this has to be accepted if you
don't want all your email read by all the spies and advertisers of the
world...

