MAIL-IN- A-BOX
Hillary Clinton’s self-hosted mail server didn’t do her presidential campaign much good. Let’s see how Jonni Bidwell’s fares…
P
eople often say that email is hard. At one stage it was considered too hard to be the subject of a standard four-page tutorial.
By the time you’ve explained Postfix, Dovecot, chromalisting, MX records, DMARC and DKIM there’s not really much room left to describe everything else. And there’s a lot of everything else.
But that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily ‘hard’, just complex. A good elucidation of this can be found at
https://bit.ly/lxf284mail.
One ‘turnkey’ offering is called Mail-in-a-Box (https:// mailinabox.email), which doesn’t use containers. Instead, it’s meant to be installed on a single-purpose machine whose only job is to be an email server. Unlike lots of things featured in this magazine, MIAB is meant to be not at all configurable, beyond of course setting domain names and mail aliases. Sure, you can SSH into it and mess with the (many) configuration files, but as soon as the system updates these will all be overwritten.
MIAB is currently based on Ubuntu 18.04, which might seem (with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS not too far away) a little old. But it’s still supported until 2023, and we’ll probably see a seamless upgraded to Ubuntu 20.04 over the coming months. You don’t need much in terms of resources to run your own mailserver. An entry-level VPS will be fine, the docs recommend at least 512MB of RAM, but you might have to sacrifice a couple of features (namely Spamassassin and ClamAV) with that amount. Unlike almost every other ‘self-hosted’ software we feature, you almost certainly can’t run a mail server using your home internet connection. ISPs (rightly) don’t want their customers’ machines turning into spam-spewing zombies, and generally block SMTP connections to home users unilaterally. You could try asking your ISP not to do this, but they’re unlikely to listen. In fact, they might start asking you awkward questions about what on earth you are doing.