Reflections on running my own mail server for 10 years
Reflections on running my own mail server for 10 years
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mail is the one thing I refuse to self host for the simple reason that despite not being particularly hard to get up and running initially, when it doesn't work for whatever reason it can be and often is a gigantic pain in the ass to deal with, especially when it's something out of your control. For personal there's very good free options, for enterprise those same free options have paid options.
Whether it be gmail having a bad day and blocking you or whatever cloud provider or on prem infrastructure crapping out for long periods of time causing you to be cut off from email for a while and potentially missing incoming mail permanently if the retries time out. Or anything in between. It's one of those things where I'm glad it isn't my problem to deal with.
My only involvement with email is ensuring I have a local copy of my inbox synced up every week so if my provider were to ever die I still have all my content.
On the other hand you can lose your email address at any time if you don't own the domain. So if Google decides they don't like something you wrote your @gmail.com address could be gone tomorrow. And with it all your accounts you set up (as you need email usually to login or do changes).
The whole e-mail ecosystem sucks :-/
My self-hosted mail server works fine for now, but that could change at any moment.
I thought that was the sensible solution, though -- you have your own domain names, but then use some reputable e-mail provider for the actual server.
E.g., I use mxroute, and wouldn't imagine setting up the e-mail servers myself, even though I still wind up having to muck about in the DNS records when getting things set up.
On the note of corporate addresses, I remember that I had a bigfoot.com e-mail address, that was supposed to be "permanent", and work as a forwarding thing, as I switched between various ISPs for my e-mail address.
It was significantly less permanent than having my own domains. And, with Google, we never quite know when they're get bored or run into money issues. But some of my domains? I'll probably have them as long as I'm alive, and that's probably long enough.