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j1mc

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My friend wants to self-host his email on a Linode instance, and I'm halfway inclined to talk him out of it. Should I?  The only people I know who do it are cwebbs and cwebbs. Oh, and cwebbs. Yeah, I just know one person. I guess the worst that can happen is that he learns the issues really well.  Maybe I can just advise him of things to watch out for and wish him luck.

Christopher Allan Webber likes this.

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I feel like my recommendation should be full on "do it!"... sadly the very reason it has become so hard to do it it is because few people are doing it.

The problems of self-hosting are an "economy of scale" problem too, paradoxically! The reason being, it's easy to push out those who self-host because they're a minority right now, and making self-hosting easier could happen, but it would require more people taking the effort to go through the problems so that solutions can be found.

Christopher Allan Webber at 2015-08-08T17:47:21Z

Doug Whitfield likes this.

I host my own. postfix + dovecot + spamassassin. I've been having trouble sending email to aol, but gmail goes through no problem. Hosted on digital ocean. I got a recomendation for sendgrid for outgoing mail, but I haven't tried it yet.

Efraim Flashner at 2015-08-08T17:56:05Z

Christopher Allan Webber likes this.

Go for it! I do this, and it has been ok so far.

I use postfix, dovecot, spamassassin and sieve.

Christopher Baines at 2015-08-08T18:54:42Z

Christopher Allan Webber, j1mc likes this.

As an ex-sysadmin, ugh.  Been there, debugged the corner cases... Perhaps it's easier with only one to five users with predictable usage and an acceptance of mistakes.

jasonriedy@fmrl.me at 2015-08-08T21:01:49Z