Sponsor: Thermal Grizzly Aeronaut on Amazon https://geni.us/e8Oq & Hydronaut (Amazon) https://geni.us/hOQrBAbWendell from Level1 Techs got up with us to talk...
I use a cheap VPS to host my email server. It’s a bit easier than running it solely at home, but there’s a lot of annoying work to “verify” yourself. Once you get your DNS records good, you shouldn’t be blocked after that (unlike a home server). It only costs me $5/month plus the domain, which I think is money well spent. Doing the admin work to make sure I’m secure still needs to happen, but I don’t mind that work and find it fun.
Gmail and other big providers tend to consider new domains to be spam until they’ve proven otherwise. Can’t prove otherwise until you’ve been up and running for a while. Catch-22. The way out of that is to host with an existing provider for a few years.
Does it cut down on spam? Perhaps. Does it favor existing providers like Gmail? Yes, definitely.
Honestly, hosting email has long been difficult to setup, and all the more so if you don’t want your box to be a spam host within three seconds of plugging it in.
I’ve been hosting a personal domain with an established-but-not-large hosting provider for around 6 years, without any troubles sending or receiving mail from that domain (via the provider’s servers, of course).
Does that mean my domain is now well established enough to take email hosting to my own server?
Is it still viable in 2024 to run a home email server? I used to have a personal Postfix box back in the day.
You’d have to be really committed. There’s more admin work than you think to make sure you’re not insecure or getting blocked.
I use a cheap VPS to host my email server. It’s a bit easier than running it solely at home, but there’s a lot of annoying work to “verify” yourself. Once you get your DNS records good, you shouldn’t be blocked after that (unlike a home server). It only costs me $5/month plus the domain, which I think is money well spent. Doing the admin work to make sure I’m secure still needs to happen, but I don’t mind that work and find it fun.
Gmail and other big providers tend to consider new domains to be spam until they’ve proven otherwise. Can’t prove otherwise until you’ve been up and running for a while. Catch-22. The way out of that is to host with an existing provider for a few years.
Does it cut down on spam? Perhaps. Does it favor existing providers like Gmail? Yes, definitely.
Honestly, hosting email has long been difficult to setup, and all the more so if you don’t want your box to be a spam host within three seconds of plugging it in.
I’ve been hosting a personal domain with an established-but-not-large hosting provider for around 6 years, without any troubles sending or receiving mail from that domain (via the provider’s servers, of course).
Does that mean my domain is now well established enough to take email hosting to my own server?
Good chance you could at this point.
Awesome. Thanks.