Don't host email yourself – your reminder in 2026

This attitude is so self-defeating. If no one hosts their own email anymore, no one will be able to host their own email anymore in the future.

Having said that, I host some of my mail with Hetzner, and even at their scale they sometimes have deliverability issues.

Back when I was first learning about Tech (early 2000's), I installed a mail server at home and configured it all wrong so I gave up on it. A few days later I noticed that my drive was getting full and didn't know why. This is how I learned about a honeypot, I had left it running, someone had used it for sending spam but since I screwed up the setup all the spam was stuck on my computer with nowhere to route out.

Last time I setup a mail server

I had one email bounced from that specific provider, I don't have a website on my mail domain, but I explained what I used it for and never had any issues. I send like less than 1 email per quarter to them and it kept working after they whitelisted my ip.

So this issue seems very specific to TEM

You’re referring to dovecot as the MTA in this article.. it’s not.

Some people say "this is obviously wrong" and other people say "this is too obviously correct to be worth mentioning." That combination can sometimes indicate an interesting point.

The solution to "my transactional email service does not deliver to one ISP" is "use a transactional email service". I have used transactional email services for low volume and highly variable sites and have had very few problems, none of them general blocks - there were warnings from providers and a single digit number of hard bounces when one site had a vulnerability to registration spam (owner thought the previous developers had a honeypot to stop it, turned out it not so).

Its very weird that low volumes are the problem. I have been self-hosting personal email for myself and a few family members (so very low volume) on an OVH VPS for years. I cannot deliver to Hotmail (MS hosted institutional email works, outlook.com works) but that is the only problem I have encountered myself. The heaviest sender in the family had emails rejected by one business.

Part of the problem is setting up a login system relying on a complicated network of unreliable mail providers (or SMS or any other poison du jour) in the critical path. That's asking for trouble even when everything on your end is done correctly and going smoothly.

happily hosting my own email, only problem has been Microslop hotmail, who use some RBL that run as a racket

https://luc.lino-framework.org/blog/2023/0725.html

(but you can just route these through someone else)

I’ve been self-hosting my personal email for over 20 years, but I would never use it to send transactional mail. That belongs on a different domain using an ESP that has the reputation for it (I prefer Postmark).

hello,

as always: imho (!)

idk:

as a business, if the "main focus" of your business is related to email =?> self-host.

but if this not your core business: why in the world would you even think about self-hosting!?

pay someone "as a service" / for your "peace of mind" and be done with that.

as a private person:

if you are interested in learning a lot about the internet and especially e-mail: do self-host ;)

if not: pay someone a few bucks a month and do stuff that matters to you ;)

just my 0.02€

- how do companies like mailchimp actually manage this?

- anyone got any ideas? is this their MOAT?

Don't host TEM email yourself, sure.

I self-host my own personal email service. And it's fine. Painful at times, yes, but serviceable.

Wrong! DO host email yourself. You can email all of the other people who have self-hosted email.

Personally I have never had any issues hosting my own email (for myself or for business customers) for the last 25 years.

The only time I've ever come across a big problem with email in general was when one of my customers was using 1and1.com hosted email, who apparently have a bad reputation due to spam, and some providers outright block them... but moving that company to self-hosted email fixed the problem.

It's true. The megacorporations are actively blocking communication between human persons because it increases their profit and the rules don't apply to them. But this doesn't mean you need to roll over and just take it. The benefits of hosting your own email far outweigh the problems of delivery to some megacorps.

>self-hosting email is an anachronism of a simpler internet. The good old days. They are long over.

This is only true if you are being paid to run a for-profit business or institution. For human people acting in their own interest the fight for free communication is far from over.

And yet email addresses being domain specific also makes it impossible for end users of popular service providers to migrate to another service, unless they are using their own domain name.