Hello,
I want to deploy a simple mail server so that it can be used for users to register themselves or reset passwords, etc.
Is there an easy one to deploy (in docker if possible) ?
Interesting how you use “simple” and “mail server” in the same sentence.
You are asking for a world of pain here.
You don’t need a mail server to send emails
Use an smtp smart host like smtp2go
+1 to this worked for me, only issue was they block common free emails (like gmails etc) from making accounts but porkbun made it super easy to make a email forward that worked!
I self host my email. It was hard work to set up. 0/10. Would not come again.
i self host my mails for almost 20 years now, it was hard work in the beginning, now it’s just a few updates a year. no problem with blacklists or anything, a good hoster is probably beneficial, 10/10 would recommend, even just to learn how all of this works
That’s true. I did learn a lot, but the idea of setting it all up again gives me anxiety.
If you do self host I suggest reading carefully the Gmail guidelines for mails. They are the leaders in the field and they dictate the level of security required.
DNS forward and reverse, DKIM, SPF, DMARC, ARC, DANE, bounce signature etc. Email is indeed a very complicated thing to host. I work on emails system all day and and I wouldn’t host my own mail.
Even worse I’m hoping email disappear and another technology takes it place. Emails are unreliable and outdated, they need to go.
Please, just don’t. It’s pain in ass
As already mentioned several times, selfhosting a mail server is not recommended unless you’re particularly interested in hosting a mail server, but with that said, you might find this project interesting:
don’t.
I wrote a blog some time ago why selfhosting email sucks
https://nx2.site/email-selfhosting
If you just want the email server for only you and your friends, or for internal messages, selfhosting email can be fun, but your main email should probably not be selfhosted.
I’d advice against it, aside from spam filters, and it being a general PITA, there is a chance your ISP will block any outgoing mail traffic (in my case orange blocks it)
Which orange ? I’m with orange Belgium.
All you need is a local smtp server that relays to another, “real” smtp server. I have a postfix that is configured to use the Proton smtp servers (before that it was Googles). No issues on Telenet.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System IP Internet Protocol SMTP Simple Mail Transfer Protocol SSD Solid State Drive mass storage
4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 5 acronyms.
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I agree with everyone here that self-hosting email is never easy, but if you still decide to go down this route then here are two tips that I personally found very helpful, especially when you decide to host it at home:
The first is to get an SMTP relay server. That’s just another mail server that yours can log into to actually send its mail, just like an email client would. That way you don’t have to worry about your IP’s sending reputation, because everyone will only see the relay’s reputable IP.
Second is to configure a Backup MX. That’s an additional MX DNS entry with lower priority than the primary, and it points to a special mail server that accepts any mail for you and tries to deliver it to the primary server forever (or something like an entire week). So when your primary server is unreachable other sending servers will deliver mail to the backup, and it delivers the mail to the primary as soon as that’s back online.
You can get these as separate services, but some DNS providers (like Strato for example) offer both with the base domain package. It makes self-hosting an email server much simpler and more reliable in my experience.
Check out https://stalw.art/
This tool is for your use case. It comes with bonus privacy features like unique address for each service so they can’t cross track you
SimpleLogin is for mail aliasing, not transactional mail.
There is Mailcow. But simple is relative I guess cause you still gotta configure a lot around it to not end up on every spamlist out there
