I’m running it on an LXC container that lives on a proxmox cluster.
2 vCPU at 2.6Ghz. 2GB of RAM (it’s LXC so I can allocate more if needed…) and 40GB of SSD-backed CEPH storage. I actually just upped this to 150GB because I can see the velocity of data I’m storing for this. I have about 2 more TB of storage on the CEPH cluster before I need to order a few more SSDs.
I have terrible internet, but I do have a static address. And they’re installing fiber in my neighborhood right now. So that will change soon too.
Based on what I’ve seen thus-far, I suspect I can handle about a hundred users on this without much issue.
Your own email server requires near 100% uptime or you risk not receiving critical emails. If a remote email server is trying to contact your email server and it can’t it’s only going to retry a few times and then give up. Hosting this yourself sounds great until you realize high uptime is not cheap and requires constant attention.
Setting it up securely can be difficult depending on your understanding of server infrastructure as well as protocols like DNS. You need to set up SPF, DKIM, DMARC, etc in order to prevent someone from faking an email from your server.
Of course, federated email does not use SPF/DKIM/DMARC because the whole point is that someone from another server could use your server to send an email (hence the federation). Open email servers were common 20 years ago but very rare today. That makes setup easier, but the main caveat is that most known non-federated email servers will reject email from servers that don’t have SPF/DKIM/DMARC because they generally end up being havens for bots and spam since there is no verification or authenticity of the sender.
As someone who self hosts a lot of things, I would never self host my email. If i did I would be paying for two boxes in different parts of the world on different ISPs to provide that uptime. I would definitely set it up securely and not as a federated server otherwise it would be practically unusable for day to day emails.
Many services (including postfix by default) will attempt a number of resend operations before it gives up.
Of course, federated email does not use SPF/DKIM/DMARC because the whole point is that someone from another server could use your server to send an email (hence the federation).
What? All email is federated. What are you talking about here? SPF/DKIM/DMARC are on top of email… and have nothing to do with the federated property of email. Federation does not mean that you login or use another server. But that you have your instance, and the servers hash out the cross communication amongst themselves. That’s EXACTLY what email servers do using SMTP.
I would definitely set it up securely and not as a federated server otherwise it would be practically unusable for day to day emails.
If your email wasn’t federated then you would get emails from anyone outside of your own instance. That would make email useless for 99% of the world.
I take “federated email” to refer to a juxtaposition with normal email implementation which harkens back to how it was in the 90s or early 00s where you didn’t need to be registered on many SMTP servers in order to use it and it’s stripped of server-side validation. There’s some discussion on this topic in the fediverse.
You’re right that the default current implementation is already federated.
My laptop is my oldest install, running Ubunutu. Started out on 14.04 and I’ve been updating ever since. My desktop runs Arch, although it used to be Antergos. I kinda convinced it to be Arch after Antergos died so I kept getting updates. Finally I’m currently trying Fedora on my secondary PC filled with old hardware from previous builds.
Honestly, out of these I personally like Fedora most currently. It seems to have up-to-date enough packages and seems quite stable. The AUR on Arch is a powerful thing, but it can also be quite hit or miss. While Ubuntu was fine as a first distro, I don’t really like how outdated all the packages are. I’ve had quite a few cases where packages where more than a year out of date.
Not likely worth it. Primary reason is that the large federated email services are skeptical of email from services such as your proposed self hosting solution and may simply not deliver the mail you send. This is to mitigate against spammers setting up bespoke servers.
There are a bunch of other things that could go wrong if you don’t set everything up perfectly, but even if you do, this would be a big problem.
Better off using a custom domain with a big provider. Fewer headaches. I like Fastmail, but many others are great too.
I have one /media/music folder which I have connected to both Jellyfin and Gonic (Subsonic). I use Gonic because it’s lighter weight than Navidrome and I don’t care about a web interface.
FinAmp is the nicest iOS music client I’ve found, and it only works with Jellyfin. On the Mac I recently started using SuperSonic (which is simple but has been more reliable for me than sonixd) which uses Gonic.
play:Sub is the most polished iOS SubSonic client, but I find the UI fussy and hard to use one-handed. Amperfy, SubStreamer, and Soundwaves are all worth trying but each frustrating in their own way. I like Amperfy the best at the moment.
I have a shared linux host account (and I occasionally help the admin with some installation stuff)
I currently host a few PHP sites on it like Dokuwiki, a few feedback forms, a mail image bug tester, piwik and a few others
Also I host a gemini server for my own site and a gemini chat server that I actually wrote myself in Java
a web2gemini gateway
a Misfin server (again wrote myself)
On a pubnix host I host a uptime kuma instance to check my main server
On a vps host I have an instance of Linkace that I wanted to try out but am not really using
Could you share you solution? You don’t have to! I am just curious how you do it since a lot of people seem to hate it, compared to self-hosting everything else.
@DidacticDumbass But yeah you're right. It's a mess nowadays with email hosting because Google for example just rejects everything except the other big services even if you comply with DKIM etc. Fuck them honestly
Yes, I still run my own email server. It is not for the faint of heart, but once it’s configured and your IP reputation is clean, it’s mostly smooth sailing. I have not had any deliverability problems to date, initial setup/learning period notwithstanding.
If you’re not scared away yet, here are some specific challenges you’ll face:
SMTP ports are typically blocked by many providers as a spam prevention measure. Hosting on a residential connection is often a complete non-starter and is becoming more difficult on business class connections as well (at least in the US, anyway).
If you plan to host in a VPS, good luck getting a clean IPv4 address. Most are on one or more public blacklists and likely several company-specific ones (cough Microsoft cough). I spent about 2 weeks getting my new VPS’s IP reputation cleaned up before I migrated from the old VPS.
Uptime: You need to have a reliable hosting solution with minimal power/server/network downtime.
Learning Curve: Email is not just one technology; it’s several that work together. So in a very basic email server, you will have Postfix as your MTA, Dovecot as your MDA, some kind of spam detection and filtering (e.g. SpamAssassin), some kind of antivirus to scan messages/attachments (e.g. Clamd), message signing (DKIM), user administration/management, webmail, etc. You’ll need to get all of these configured and operating in harmony.
Spam prevention standards: You’ll need to know how to work with DNS and create/manage all of the appropriate records on your domain (MX, SPF, DMARC, DKIM records, etc). All of these are pretty much required in 2023 in order for messages from your server to reach your recipient.
Keeping your IP reputation clean: This is an ongoing challenge if you host for a lot of people. It can only take one or two compromised accounts to send a LOT of spam and land your IP/IP block on a blacklist.
Keeping up with new standards: When I set my mail server up, DMARC and DKIM weren’t required by most recipient servers. Around 2016, I had to bolt on OpenDKIM to my email stack otherwise my messages ended up in the recipient’s spam folder. -Contingency Plan: One day you may just wake up and decide it’s too much to keep managing your own email server. I’m not there yet, but I’ve already got a plan in place to let a bigger player take over when the time comes.
Yep. I’ve hosted my own mail server since the early oughts. One additional hurdle I’d add to you list is rDNS. If you can’t get that set up, you’ll have a hard time reaching many mail servers. Besides port blocking, that’s one of the many reason it’s a non-starter on consumer ISP.
I actually started on a static ISDN line when rDNS wasn’t an issue for running a mail server. Moved to business class dsl, and Ameritech actually delegated rDNS to me for my /29. When I moved to Comcast business, they wouldn’t delegate the rDNS for the IPv4. They did create rDNS entries for me, and they did delegate the rDNS for the IPv6 block. Though the way they deal with the /56 IPv6 block means only the first /64 is useable for rDNS.
But, everything you list has been things I’ve needed to deal with over the years.
Yeah, I totally forgot about reverse DNS. Good catch. I probably left out a few other things what with the repressed trauma of it all. lol.
I had to deal with Suddenlink business, and they were (somehow) surprisingly worse than what you described for Comcast (I didn’t know that was possible, TBH). Suddenlink wouldn’t even unblock the SMTP ports at all let alone delegate rDNS to our static.
I love my Anbernic handhelds. Pretty much any of them, but I draw the line at the Android ones. Might as well just get a controller for a phone at that point. The Linux ones are neat though - currently my daily driver is the 351V. Debated getting a 351P, partially because I mostly play GBA and the screen is made for that but also because I collect them.
Lemmy and kbin are two different forum software that can be installed and run on servers. Because both use the ActivityPub protocol, the content between them can be shared. So, a Lemmy user will be able to see content from a server running kbin, using Lemmy.
There isn’t an option, you can’t even tell but you already have the kbin content.
You can’t disable it.
The reason that’s happening right now is because kbin is enacting ddos protection using cloudflare so they aren’t federating properly, this is a temporary problem.
Is this only some kbin instances thing or all kbin instances thing? I'm fairly sure that fedia.io (/kbin instance) does not use cloudflare. But that would definitely explain why I'm struggling to search some instances that might use it.
Always looking for more, but so far it’s pretty minimal.
Pi.hole with Gravity Sync
openhabian for smarthome hub
Looking to add Jellyfin and a sonarr radarr setup, but my QNAP doesn’t like doing actual work so I’ve been struggling. Planning to add a mini PC soon as a more stable server and to centralize things a bit.
kbin.life
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