I know the adage that self-hosting email is hard. I use a third party smtp server to send emails for my Lemmy instance in order to guarantee delivery, for example.

However, other than potential uptime, what are the disadvantages to setting up self-hosted incoming email?

Incoming email is like 99% of my email usage. I’m happy to use a third party mail provider for outgoing email, but don’t see why I shouldn’t simply host incoming email myself.

Thank you <3

  • binwiederhier@discuss.ntfy.shEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    I hosted my incoming mail for years with a minimal postfix config that would just relay to Gmail. That got me individual email addresses per service (e.g. grubhub@mydomain.com, …) that I could turn off when a service got annoying.

    It worked wonderfully without issues for years. And by years i mean 8-10 years!

    Recently, 11 months ago, i noticed that some mails were not relayed anymore, and i ultimately switched to Cloudflare for that feature. You can read more about that here: https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/vqk4j9/mail_relay_as_a_service_moving_away_from/

    That said, if you only want to store the incoming mail, I don’t think you’ll have issues beyond spam, a lot of spam.

    Good luck.