BTW, there is soo much FUD in your comment, check http://www.postfix.org/ before claiming "someone will hack your email"
"""
First of all, thank you for your interest in the Postfix project.
What is Postfix? It is Wietse Venema's mail server that started life at IBM research as an alternative to the widely-used Sendmail program. Now at Google, Wietse continues to support Postfix.
Postfix attempts to be fast, easy to administer, and secure.
"""
It sounds less like FUD than a change in perspective.
When I was in my twenties, I would have empathized with your point. I used to host my own web servers, but back then, my main priorities were curiosity, privacy and independence.
Not just that, I opened accounts for friends and family.
A decade later, I made all my hosting someone elses‘ problem, because I had different priorities.
There‘s nothing like the sound of a friend shouting in your ear because he trusted you with his mail address and he‘s running into weird errors. Or trying to get an important email delivered after a 10h crunch shift when you just want to bring your kids to bed instead.
I‘m thankful for all those learnings, but nowadays, I‘m old enough to just want mail to frickin work, that‘s why Google does it for me on a custom domain.
As I got further into my thirties, I became much more aware of the concept of opportunity cost: by deciding to do one thing, I'm by definition deciding to not do others. Running my own mail server is one task that has not made the cut for being more worthwhile than other priorities in my life.
Sad to see all the negativism. To anyone considering it, just run your own email infrastructure and don't let the naysayers put you down. Email is far too critical to let any megacorporation own you on it.
I spend approximately no time at all in maintaining my email infrastructure which I set up around ~10 years ago.
Of all the things I self-host and self-manage, my email server and related parts is the one which requires the least attention and ongoing work, by far. Set up postfix, it'll take some work initially, then it'll chug along forever.
EDIT 2: I don't understand why other comments are so agressive against the author for sharing how he runs his own mail server, I'm not sure if it comes from one's frustration, failures, unreasonable expectations about email, but I noticed that everything related to servers or email receives this hate (here on HN, eh?). Come on, let's start a new year where we appreciate someone sharing their experience in running a mail server :-)
Here is a true statement: "I speak English and have black hair, like Keanu Reeves. I'm looking into growing a beard."
If, based on the above, I were to tell people I looked like Keanu Reeves, would you consider that a reasonable claim?
BTW I'm not deriding your efforts. I'm just saying there's a big gap between 'setting up my first email server with webmail and IMAP access' and 'setting up something with the features and reliability of Gmail'.
Thanks and cheers for being nice! Happy holidays to you too - I’m not really that surprised how negative the comments are here, including attacks on me personally it feels like.
If they don’t like it, stay with Gmail, I don’t care. I would just rather live in a world where the internet isn’t controlled by 2 or 3 big companies. Hacking a server for email and making it work like gmail was the aim, and I did it in less than an hour. Some people on here are pissed that I didn’t consider every eventuality, and filtering, and spam and this and that. Fine, but attacks on me as a person reflect more on who you are as a person.
If you don’t like how I wrote or setup the server, do one and make one yourself - or just stay with Gmail
dang must have the day off or something. The number of rulebreaking "shallow dismissals" in the comments is staggering. Hope you don't let it get to you! This community often thinks it's the center of the internet in my experience, and by proxy any mistake that happens is some sort of crime against the internet that you should pay for.
Cheers, I haven’t - I’m old & ugly enough to read them and let it not affect me. A few have genuinely good points, and I’ve replied to those. Some are just annoyed i didn’t setup a 6 node Kube cluster with 24/7 AI intrusion bot detection with a brand new UI with OCR text detection for image uploads.
Experimenting on the internet is what i did, and it’s what I’ll continue to do, despite what other dullards might say is a waste of time
If youre not on the cloud (and even there on AWS and maybe Google Cloud…Azure is ok in a pinch… and iCloud everything if you also overlap with the Mac crowd) are you even an engineer, seems to be one popular strain of HN thought, which comes out particularly aggressively against e-mail servers because they are arguably the worst type of server to run on your own.
I think it's because many of us here also did run our own email servers at some point in time, until realization came how hard it is to implement and support all features one gets instantly and effortlessly with gmail and such
Nice! Thanks for the hard work everyone involved! I have nothing to complain, things just works for me so far, but great to see improvements in the pipe! :D
> ... multi region. Cheapest and quickest option if you want to have at least some fault tolerance.
That is simple not true, you have to adapt your application to be multi region aware to start with, and if you do that on AWS you are basically locked-in, and one of the most expensive cloud providers out there.
You're saying it's not true, but do you have another example of a quick and cheap way to do this ?
I'm not saying this can be done in 1 day for 2 cents, I'm saying that it's quick and cheap compared to other options.
> adapt your application to be multi region aware
This vs adapting your application to support multi cloud deployments or go from the cloud to start doing on prem with a dedicated team, you can take your bets.
On aws you can setup route 53 to point to multiple regions based on health check or latency.
Excuse me, do we need all that complexity? Telling that it is "hard" is justifiable?
It is naive to assume people bashing AWS are uncapable to running things better, cheaper, faster, across many other vendors, on-prem, colocation or what not.
> Outrage is the easy response.
That is what made AWS get the marketshare it has now in the first place, the easy responses.
The main selling point of AWS in the beginning was "how easy is to sping a virtual machine". After basically every layman started recommending AWS and we flocked there, AWS started making things more complex than it should. Was that to make harder to get out of it? IDK.
> Empathy and learning is the valuable one.
When you run your infrastructure and something fails and you are not transparent, your users will bash you, independently who you are.
And that was another "easy response" used to drive companies towards AWS. We developers were echoing that "having a infrastructure team or person is not necessary", etc.
Now we are stuck in this learned helplessness where every outage is a complete disaster in terms of transparency, multiple services failing, even for multi-region and multi-az customers, we saying "this service here is also not working" and AWS simple states that service was fine, not affected, up and running.
If it was a sysadmin doing that, people will be asking for his/her neck with pitchforks.
> AWS started making things more complex than it should
I don’t think this is fair for a couple reasons:
1. AWS would have had to scale regardless just because of the number of customers. Even without adding features. This means many data centers, complex virtual networking, internal networks, etc. These are solving very real problems that happen when you have millions of virtual servers.
2. AWS hosts many large, complex systems like Netflix. Companies like Netflix are going to require more advanced features out of AWS, and this will result in more features being added. While this is added complexity, it’s also solving a customer problem.
My point is that complexity is inherent to the benefits of the platform.
Not to mention the amount of garbage in the cloud, the constant learned helplessness that we have to endure even knowing that the situation could have been avoided or even mitigated/solved if the access to the box was possible.
The status-quo of the cloud is uninspiring to say the least...
