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The original was posted on /r/selfhosted by /u/usrdef on 2024-09-28 12:12:10+00:00.

This isn’t an issue, but I wanted to just reach out to the people on this sub and say thanks.

Along with the help I’ve had along the way, I’ve been able to successfully set up my own email server.

This is coming from a point where I have rented a VPS from a company. And anyone who has rented one and tried to set up email, you’ll come to realize real quick that 95% of all public hosted servers are automatically added to every block list known to man which makes it impossible to send / receive email to the more popular services like Google and Microsoft.

Over the last months, along with the help I’ve received, I spent the time setting up my own email server, using dovecot / postfix (the old-school way I guess you could say). Along with learning spamassasin / rspam, and figuring out how to write rules to properly filter.

I then went through and did an astronomical amount of research into all the different records that are needed, DMAR, TSLA, SPF, DKIM1, mta-sts / tls, PTR, etc.

Learned about Docker, Traefik, docker networking, iptables, the list goes on.

Then I had to learn about SSL certificates, setting up automatic generation from Let’s Encrypt, so that I can use 465 or 587 with SSL, and without issue.

And then also learn about DNSSEC (shout out to the info at )

After learning about every record type, how they work, and setting them up properly, I then reached out to all of the companies that monitor spam (such as Spamhaus, 0Spam, Hostkarma), and fought with them to prove that I’m a real person running a legit server.

After months of fighting, I got the last approval from a spam website, and after running a check, my server is now in none of the spam databases.

All my records come back as correct, and I’m able to send/receive email to and from any service I want, as well as setting up SSL properly so that I didn’t have to cheat with services and do things like disable TLS/Certificate validation.

Outlook, Google, and all the major providers accept my emails without issue, no blocks, no bull.

It may sound silly to others, but it’s a major sense of accomplishment. And sure, I could have gone with one of the email providers, but I wanted to do it the old fashion way, learn about all the aspects that make up email / domain security, and build something from the ground up.

And it was one hell of a fight. But keep this in mind. I’ve seen a lot of posts online about self-hosted email servers being something you should avoid. I had almost no experience going into this in regards to how email really worked, and what makes up the steps that an email takes to get from point A to point B.

If I can do this, anyone can. My IP reputation was probably on the more extreme end. And as someone else mentioned below; I focused on getting my server unblocked from every single major player. If you get a more clean IP, or you’re not worried about being restricted on some “lesser-known” email hosts; then you’ll have an easier time getting this done.

It’s definitely doable. And if you’re up for learning something new, I’d definitely recommend it as a side project.