I was wondering how practical it would be to run my own email server at home, I’ve set up servers before and know how to forward ports and such. Would it be possible to do it on an rpi 4 and do you guys have recommendations on any free software for setting up an email server. Thanks!

  • UnreliantGiant
    8·
    3 years ago

    Technically it’s going to work, but practically it will be unusable in the real world because major E-Mail providers block residential IPs. I have mailcow running on a VPS and it’s great. I’m planning to set it up at home one day and then let it use the VPS IP over Wireguard, but I don’t have a proper homeserver yet :/

    • Sr Estegosaurio
      1·
      3 years ago

      Yeah, I was investigating about it and afaik in my country having a static IP is 50€/month. I personally dislike a lot the idea of hosting it somewhere else… But I’m not rich lmao. Any good privacy friendly host?

      • Sr Estegosaurio
        1·
        3 years ago

        But someone said it in the comments, you can store your email locally and also save space in the cloud, and if you use gpg all is more or less okey.

  • JNX_Complex
    5·
    3 years ago

    Setting up your own email server is a great way to learn how to manage an email server, but it’s also a pain and with most isps you can’t use port 25 for outbound traffic. Sendmail is good to look at for your smtp server and postfix but it’s been years since I’ve used them. Played around with Citadel but never got too far with it as I was trying to setup an internal email server for a company a few years back but they ended up changing their mind and wanting to go with an exchange server instead.

  • Anachron
    2·
    3 years ago

    I host mine on a VPS, I love having endless aliases to use.

  • gabor
    2·
    3 years ago

    I set it up with Postfix and it’s running rock solid for a year now. But as a newbie to email hosting, it took me months to configure DMARC, DKIM, rDNS and all that stuff. I am actually running it on a dynamic IP and relaying outgoing mails through my domain provider to avoid blacklists. Works very well for me!

    If you have a dedicated rpi4 for this, maybe you want to have a look at mail-in-a-box?

    https://mailinabox.email/

    I haven’t tried it myself, but it uses almost the same components that I individually set up for my own server…

  • ysuOP
    1·
    3 years ago

    Thanks everybody for the help, I’ll continue to look into it.