I host almost everything. I have half a dozen Raspberry Pis, two PCs, and an old thin client that run most of my digital life. Services include Unbound, Pi-hole with fully redundant VPNs, file server, Google Photo swap, Joplin and dozens of AI services.
I love self-hosting, it’s all about it. However, a recent quick foray into self-hosted email reminded me why indeed a terrible thing to host yourself.
Why do you automatically accept email in the first place?
The desire to host everything is inevitable
Email, like a phone number, is your gateway to the digital world. You use it to access websites, receive important notifications, and communicate personally and professionally.
Every time I think about it, a number of things come to mind that make me i want to do this.
- Nobody reads my letter — No message scanning provider, no advertising profile set up in my inbox, and No AI training.
- No arbitrary limits – My storage and domains will be mine.
- No monthly fees — No additional costs other than the server domain name.
Despite the appeal, self-hosted email is also a monumental undertaking—probably the hardest thing you can do to host yourself. That in itself makes it somewhat attractive, a bit like climbing Everest, which is a self-host.
Self-hosting is an email headache
Many things must work perfectly together
Most self-hosted services are relatively simple to get up and running. They are usually one, maybe two, services, and often have all-in-one installer scripts that guide you through every important decision about service behavior. Email is a very different story.
When I started going through the self-mailing process again, I quickly remembered that a big part of the challenge is how many components need to work together to create a working email. have:
- MTA — Handles the actual sending and receiving of mail over SMTP.
- IMAP server — Saves your email and lets your phone and computer actually read it.
- Spam filter (as SpamAssassin) — Tries to keep spam and nonsense out of your inbox.
- Authenticator — Keeps it together so you can send and email only as you.
And then there are some other considerations. You need a Sender Policy Framework (SPF) to prevent spoofing, DKIM to cryptographically sign your outgoing mail, and DMARC to handle exceptions.
If you get it wrong, it can completely break your email or partially hack your email and it may take you a while to realize it.
There are packages like Mailcow, Mail-in-a-box, and Mailu that aim to simplify the process by bringing everything together, but you’re still running into the same basic problem: Reliable email requires a ton of parts to work seamlessly together. Individual parts can fail while others work as they should, causing errors that you may have missed at first.
And then, on top of that, you need physical hardware that’s reliable extremely strong security measures so you never lose any email.
- Storage Capacity
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2 – 26 TB
- Work load
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550TB/year
- suitable for
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NAS
Western Digital’s Red Pro NAS hard drives come in sizes from 2TB to 26TB.
Hacking email is very easy
It may not be your fault at all
Unfortunately, even if you do everything right, you are still vulnerable to external forces beyond your control.
Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo cover most of the world’s email, and they famously do other email providers – especially if it originates from an unexpected IP address – and for good reason. It is a popular vector for email all kinds of cyber attacks.
This could mean you get locked out of the door right away. Even if you manage to deliver emails successfully, one “unusual” behavior can cause your IP to be blocked by Google or Microsoft. At that point you’re stuck, unable to send email, which pretty much defeats the purpose of self-hosting an email server.
If Navidrome crashes, I’m out of music; if email crashes i lose everything
Not only is it difficult to get email on your own, but the stakes are pretty high. If I lost access to my email, I would lose access to dozens of services, recover passwords, and get 2FA codes. It would be unbelievably annoying to work around.
Apart from the simple inconvenience, there is also the problem of lost data. If your email server goes down and you receive a message, SMTP will try to ensure that you receive it finally. However, this doesn’t immediately solve your problem during the outage: You don’t have access to your email. And an outage may not be your fault. Freezing rain can take down your home email server for hours, or even days.
Email just isn’t worth the trouble
Self-hosting is a great hobby, and I’m constantly trying to self-host an email server for the experience, if nothing else. However, the difficulty combined with the risk ultimately makes it worthless.
Managing a reliable email server is a full-time job, and I’ll leave that to the professionals.
