Why you really DON'T want to self-host your own e-mail server

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on /r/selfhosted

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  • Mail-in-a-Box

    Mail-in-a-Box helps individuals take back control of their email by defining a one-click, easy-to-deploy SMTP+everything else server: a mail server in a box.

  • Somebody never heard of https://mailinabox.email/

  • emailwiz

    Script that installs/configures a Dovecot, Postfix, Spam Assassin, OpenDKIM Debian web server

  • I use Luke Smith's emailwiz.

  • InfluxDB

    Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

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  • docker-mailserver

    Production-ready fullstack but simple mail server (SMTP, IMAP, LDAP, Antispam, Antivirus, etc.) running inside a container.

  • There are too many people here trying to reinvent the wheel. I've been running my own server for years via https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver in my kubernetes cluster and it is one of the most reliable pieces of kit I have running. It has never broken on me, every email client I try works, it took at most a day to set up, and my mail delivers as well as my gmail, as far as I can tell. I stuck a roundcube container in front of it for a web interface (client cert protected) and it works great too. I get unlimited email addresses at any domain I own, unlimited aliases and mailboxes, etc. I'd be paying hundreds in g-suite accounts to have things set up like I do and it costs me at most a dollar a month in server resources.

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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