Been self hosting mail for over a decade and its never been easier thanks to stalwart. The IP block list thing is true though, but mostly you request removal once from Microsoft and spamhaus and that's it.
this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2025
254 points (86.9% liked)
Lemmy Shitpost
35990 readers
4508 users here now
Welcome to Lemmy Shitpost. Here you can shitpost to your hearts content.
Anything and everything goes. Memes, Jokes, Vents and Banter. Though we still have to comply with lemmy.world instance rules. So behave!
Rules:
1. Be Respectful
Refrain from using harmful language pertaining to a protected characteristic: e.g. race, gender, sexuality, disability or religion.
Refrain from being argumentative when responding or commenting to posts/replies. Personal attacks are not welcome here.
...
2. No Illegal Content
Content that violates the law. Any post/comment found to be in breach of common law will be removed and given to the authorities if required.
That means:
-No promoting violence/threats against any individuals
-No CSA content or Revenge Porn
-No sharing private/personal information (Doxxing)
...
3. No Spam
Posting the same post, no matter the intent is against the rules.
-If you have posted content, please refrain from re-posting said content within this community.
-Do not spam posts with intent to harass, annoy, bully, advertise, scam or harm this community.
-No posting Scams/Advertisements/Phishing Links/IP Grabbers
-No Bots, Bots will be banned from the community.
...
4. No Porn/Explicit
Content
-Do not post explicit content. Lemmy.World is not the instance for NSFW content.
-Do not post Gore or Shock Content.
...
5. No Enciting Harassment,
Brigading, Doxxing or Witch Hunts
-Do not Brigade other Communities
-No calls to action against other communities/users within Lemmy or outside of Lemmy.
-No Witch Hunts against users/communities.
-No content that harasses members within or outside of the community.
...
6. NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.
-Content that is NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.
-Content that might be distressing should be kept behind NSFW tags.
...
If you see content that is a breach of the rules, please flag and report the comment and a moderator will take action where they can.
Also check out:
Partnered Communities:
1.Memes
10.LinuxMemes (Linux themed memes)
Reach out to
All communities included on the sidebar are to be made in compliance with the instance rules. Striker
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
What is stalwart?
A software stack for mail hosting
I've actually been having a great time with simple-nixos-mailserver.
Running with a dedicated ipv4 at a highly reputable hoster, to my knowledge, I haven't landed in a spam folder yet!
Al slop
Wait, why? I thought I was generally gold at spotting these things, but here I'm struggling. The only thing that looks a little out of place to ne is the ring on his pointing hand, but that might genuinely be a dark band + shadow. What else have I missed?
ai image... with positive vote??? on myfediverse??? what a shame
Because it's hard to notice it.
it looks uncanny and i also know OP, they used to post chatgpt slop here
It really is. I used to be able to tell the difference, but where do you people see that it’s AI in this image?
If you're in doubt, zoom in. There's probably more, as some background detail are blurred enough for the AI to be allowed to be sloppy there.
AI slop yet again!
https://lemmy.zip/comment/19712446
Reminder of this:
https://poolp.org/posts/2019-08-30/you-should-not-run-your-mail-server-because-mail-is-hard/
And that mailu.io (and other similar projects) makes self-hosting email almost trivial 😁 (at least for people that can run a pre-configured
docker-compose.ymland buy their domain etc)
True story. Email is one of the last things I'd try to host myself.
This person has been there.
I'm still there. I've always wanted to be able to offer an email service to family or friends. But, even though I've been doing it for a couple of decades, it's never been stable enough to offer to them. For part of that time it's because I didn't really know enough of what I was doing, but the more I learned and the better I got at it, the more I started to lose the war against both spammers and against the major service providers who kept making it harder and harder to prove you're not a spammer.
The latest one was literally issue 3. My provider splits an IPV6 /64 among multiple VPSes, when most of the world, including blocklist publishers, think a /64 is for a single "entity". The only way to resolve it was to not use IPV6.
that third one killed it for me. I hate what the Internet has become. We need to setup a second Internet that somehow can't be monetized.
It's called the i2p network
Correct. Come to I2P and experience 90s internet again. It's slow but has character, if by character you understand I mean anonymous Geocities.
Honest question: is there also a boatload of sketchy stiff to avoid if you just wanted to have a nice SFW time? Early 2000s internet before Google indexed everything had some pockets of unsavory.
Also, is it just a bunch of middle aged dudes in mostly text forums? That's like 85% of my experience with 90s internet.
So it's slow, barely contains anything, and near useless. Got it.
I'm locked in a contract with a company that enshittified their services a little and assigns restrictive IPs to non-Business customers that have been using port 25, but am switching to a more libre ISP as soon as it ends. I basically snoozed and didn't realise the ISP hadn't been rated the best for several years.
I still self host. Since 1997.
Since 2000, nothing beats mimedefang on sendmail to this day.
I work for a web hosting company. Do we offer clients mail services? Hell no.
I stopped hosting my own email servers many years ago, even when I was being paid for it. Any time anyone mentions DKIM or yahoo throttling or anything of that nature I get a thousand yard stare and and start to hyperventilate. I'm sure it easier when you aren't sending 5 million messages a month, but who needs the headache.
What kind of operation was this? That’s 170,000 emails a day!
Backend provider for Realtors. New listing alerts and updates on properties that potential buyers were tracking.
Long ago I think it was 2006, I worked in a computer store/corporate it support that used to also be a 56k dial up isp. When i first got hired it was supposed to be like a paid internship. 2 weeks in the guy "mentoring" me was fired. Only other employees was the owner was had a PhD in information technology from 1984 and never kept up and his wife who did the accounting.
Over the next year he hired and fired probably 15 people and then decided he liked me enough to make me full time. He had no idea what he was doing and neither did I. Basically I was responsible for 8 business networks(including a 150 employee credit union), any computers a customer brought in, and our own internal network.
One day it was slow so I was browsing various web comics. The owner comes on at 1030(we opened at 900) furious with me. He claimed I was "reading a page with black text on a white background" which meant I was reading how to operate a spam business. That was his proof, a page with black text and a white background which he could not find my history.
He had received a letter from his isp that we were sending 2.5 million emails a day, we had 72 hours to resolve the issue or we were to be cut off. I argued that I didn't run a spam operation, he had no proof and there were simpler explanations. It got so heated I quit, keep in mind I was only employee.
Next day the credit union was having a server issue and he had no one to fix it. He called me asking for me to return, I negotiated a $1 hour raise, an official written letter of apology, pay for time the previous day and that day and told him I would be back the following day.
I went in, solved the server issue(eventually found out cleaning crew was unplugging the power strip to plug in their vaccum over night and the server was configured not to restart when power returned). Went back to the office and talked with the owner. He showed me the letter and it identified 2 ip addresses as being the source. Neither was my computer and I didn't recognize them. There was a command you could send over the terminal to open the CD tray based on ip address. I ran the command and basically walked around looking for a computer with open CD trays.
Turns out there was 2 servers, outside of our firewall directly facing the internet and yes for the memes they were originally dns servers from the 56k isp days. They were running original nt4, completely unpatched, with no security software installed and permanent outside facing ip addresses. I ran a virus scanner on it, I stopped when it detected over 100k infected files. Disconnected the servers, waited 10 minutes, called isp and effectively all email had stopped (the boss and myself both sent 1 email to confirm it was still working).
Spam farm.
I do fine.
Let me know if you need on prem Exchange. I got you covered.
I self-host my emails, but use an SMTP relay for sending. IMO, the interesting part of self hosting email is the storage. Outbound sending is more complex and there's not as much benefit to self-hosting it.
I use Mailcow and have it configured to use a relay per domain. Email clients use the Mailcow server as their SMTP server, and Mailcow (well, Postfix) handles sending it to the appropriate relay.
I have Stalwart installed and use an SMTP relay too. I can send and receive email just fine, never had an issue with that. The only thing that doesn't really work is the account setup (when you add your account to an email client). It doesn't detect the settings, so I have to add them manually and I have to ignore the certificate warning but maybe I'll get around to fixing it someday.
It doesn't detect the settings
Autodiscovery needs DNS SRV entries to be added for each domain. The legacy Exchange- and Outlook-specific way was a file at /autodiscover/autodiscover.xml but I don't know if email clients still use that.
I have to ignore the certificate warning
I'm not familiar with Stalwart but you should be able to use Let's Encrypt certificates.
Your slop-pooping machine is bad at text parallax and it still looks gross
You're a slop-poooing machine.
Don’t shame me for my IBS
This seems more like a poorly assembled template than GenAI
It is definitely both.
The tie pattern is probably the most obvious artifact, but the lighting and focus being inconsistent is what kicks off the intuitive “this is definitely GenAI” sense
The image is hypersaturated and hyperaveraged
Mailcow internal on Debian VM.
SMTP2Go free external relay.
Have had the occasional issue after an upgrade or reboot can't find my LetsEncrypt cert and will bork the system until I manually fix it. Perhaps my latest script update finally resolved that.
Otherwise, not that bad. Been running my own email for about 5 years or so. I don't sign up for many outside services with it. It's mainly for internal alerting or testing purposes but still works very well.
How do you handle backups?
The other side of email is that it has become the default identity provider for the Internet. If that VM becomes unrecoverable somehow, how would you get access to your past emails?