The project looks cool! However, I think the hard part of self-hosting email is not the tech stack, it's getting email delivered to your recipients using Google or Microsoft severe email servers. It's hard to rent a server that IP address is not in a block that big email providers consider suspicious already or will soon. And any mishaps can get you locked out and you need manual intervention to be allowed again.
I used to self-host years ago but I've abandoned the idea now.
I've not really had those issues. A temporary block a few times, but that gets resolved.
FWIW, with mox, I prefer not to rely on blocklists (centralized!). Incoming mail is first checked with reputation of the sender. This reputation is only per account. So one accounts junk-classification doesn't affect another accounts. Only for new senders, and without conclusive signals, would a DNSBL be used. The result is that you can keep communicating with folks you've been communicating with for years, even if their IP is on a blocklist.
I wonder if the large providers are doing something like this as well. I suspect many mail servers use a DNSBL early in an SMTP session.
Big providers, especially Microsoft, have become extremely heavy handed the last year or so. Now, if a single IP address in a /24 is sending spam, Microsoft will just block the entire /24. And we've had so much difficulty getting Microsoft to walk back that block and not reinstate it later on that we've completely given up providing any type of email service (whether that be day-to-day email needs or transactional emails). I've spent hours on calls with Microsoft support trying to remedy this and it's just impossible once it happens (and I've had it happen multiple times to multiple IPs and had multiple MS techs confirm this is what is happening)
Ditto. Although I keep thinking about going back to it.
99.9% of the time self hosting is fine. But then a critical business email is never received (like replying to an interview request or business proposal). The worst part is you never even know it failed to be received. The worst offenders are outlook.com and yahoo.com in my experience of self-hosting email for about 10 years. I stopped around 4 years ago after a critical email disappeared and impacted me financially.
Only way to guarantee your emails are always sent and received is to use a major email provider, sadly. Or hire a team to actively look after your domain and make sure large providers are not filtering your emails.
However, given my emails now are pretty much just for personal usage, I may look at moving back to self hosted. Greylisting is the superior approach to spam control imo and you can only get this with self hosted. Mox looks really great and I'll def consider it.
It's funny how difficult it is to get email into Google or Microsoft, when, as an email admin, I want to block @gmail.com and @outlook.com because 90% of email from those domains is spam.
I had a family member work at a company that blocked gmail. They were a lotus notes shop tied with MS AD, and their admin was very anti-google. "Gmail is a cesspit of spam" or something like that. But... then was all in on MS. "MS is great - they have no spam problems". Which is just... wrong.
So... I couldn't email my family member at their work from my gmail. Not a big deal for me, but I know it impacted their ability to work with some clients and providers. And then... sure enough, they were getting spam from MS-hosted stuff (outlook.com, azure hosted stuff, etc).
He might have thought he was getting one over on google or something like that - I'm sure they didn't give a toss about it.
Without a tech stack it is impossible to self-host email, so, it is the hard part. Just this week I had huge problems with an expected email not reaching either of my gmail or outlook inboxes. It just never came, despite the sender insisting they sent it. This isn't an isolated case.
With MXRoute and my own self-hosted email, I'm slowly moving away from the big ones.
" Just this week I had huge problems with an expected email not reaching either of my gmail or outlook inboxes. It just never came, despite the sender insisting they sent it."
That's been the opposite problem for me. I can see my email leaving my client, see it hitting my SMTP server, and I can see Gmail accepting it. The client cannot find the emails. Not in their Spam folder either. I have no issues sending to my test Gmail account or my friends, but new people? Forget it. Google simply loses the email. I"ve tried to contact them to no avail (no surprise) and the usual answer I get from others is "well, just use gmail. nobody self hosts anymore."
>it's getting email delivered to your recipients using Google or Microsoft severe email servers.
That's why one ought to do ip warming on the ip and contact different big email provider to get the ip white listed. It is not impossible. Maybe ought to be a service to do all that bureaucratic stuff.
I use Amazon SES to send system-generated messages from a couple of tiny websites I ran on EC2. When applying I needed to specify the volume, and put in a generous number in case the sites got a busy day - maybe 100-200/day (when realistic traffic probably averages single digits/day).
I use sendgrid to send mail I host on Linode I manage with Cloudron which works with sendgrid and others out of the box. Cloudron is a cool paid server management app but their free tier includes email. Literally give the app your DNS provider details and API key, your sending service details (or internal smtp if you hate it when people actually recieve your email) and the rest is 100% automatic. The free tier limits how many one-button-press apps you can install. They're all regular open source apps, but they nicely maintain docket images for them all and the setup, including DNS for subdomains, is automatic and really smooth. I havr nothing to do with them but I was surprised by how smooth it was.
There’s more services that have free tiers but I doubt that is sustainable and I’m really not interested in periodically rushing to fix things if the next service starts turning the thumbscrews.
I used to self-host years ago but I've abandoned the idea now.