So I’ve been running self-hosted email using Mailu for a couple of months (after migrating out of Google Workspace). Today it turned that although my server seems to be capable of sending and receiving emails, it also seems to be used by spammers. I’ve stumbled upon this accidentally by looking through logs. This seems to have been going on for all this time (first “unknown” access happened just a couple of hours after I’ve set everything up).
While browsing the logs there were just so many crazy things happening - the incoming connections were coming through some kind of proxy built-in to Mailu, so I couldn’t even figure out what was their source IP. I have no idea why they could send emails without authorization - the server was not a relay. Every spammy email also got maximum spam score - which is great - but not very useful since SMTP agent ignored it and proceeded to send it out. Debugging was difficult because every service was running in a different container and they were all hooked up in a way that involved (in addition to the already mentioned proxy) bridges, virtual ethernet interfaces and a jungle of iptables-based NAT that was actually nft under the hood. Nothing in this architecture was actually documented anywhere, no network diagrams or anything - everything has to be inferred from netfilter rulesets. For some reason “docker compose” left some configuration mess during the “down” step and I couldn’t “docker compose up” afterwards. This means that every change in configuration required a full OS reboot to be applied. Finally, the server kept retrying to send the spammy emails for hours so even after (hypothetically) fixing all the configuration issues, it would still be impossible to tell whether they really were fixed because the spammy emails that were submitted before the fix already got into the retry loop.
I have worked on obfuscation technologies and I’m honestly impressed by the state of email servers. I have temporarily moved back to Google Workspace but I’m still on the lookout for alternatives.
Do you know of any email server that could be described as simple? Ideally a single binary with sane defaults, similarly to what dnsmasq is for DNS+DHCP?
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ProtonMail. 100%.
I set up custom DNS and catchall so yourcompanyname@saltycowboy.org is really how I filter spam.
Please note, saltycowboy.org isn’t really my domain.
So you’re saying it’s available? 👀
I’ve also done the same, it’s been great.
unless you realllllly enjoy self hosting your email, IMO it’s just not worth it anymore with the state of things. I use Fastmail and could not be happier.
Same here. Gave up and went fastmail. Love em.
I use fastmail, and I enjoy it a lot. Their masked email is very nice as well, and integrates with bitwarden. So quite convenient to use my personal domain for stuff where my identity matters, and use masked @fastmail addresses for more disposable stuff.
The only thing that ticks me a tiny bit is that their mobile app doesn’t have offline mode; but you can use imap client or w/e, so it’s not too much of an issue.
Also hear good things about protonmail; I would consider it if I didn’t already use/trust fastmail.
Another vote for Fastmail. In my recent effort to degoogle I switched to Fastmail and I love it.
For mobile with fastmail, I use fairemail. Works great with it, and provides a nice merged view with my non-fastmail work emails.
im an old school email admin. i gave up on my personal exchange box for protonmail years ago… multiple domains, lots of dns nonsense on my part. zero problems.
i highly recommend them.
https://mxroute.com/ is what I went with. They have a $99 lifetime plan. Semi limited, but worth it imho.
I’d be super cautious about relying on any company that even offers a “lifetime” plan.
Offers like that are tools to raise cash - take money now for a service that you will provide people in the future. They tend to get used in one of two situations:
- We need to raise money for investment in upgrades, so take the equivalent of ~2-3 years subscription from people up front, and count on the investment bringing in enough new customers paying regular rates that you can cover the cost of having the lifetime customers out of revenue
- We need cash now or we aren’t going to be able to pay salaries, and it won’t matter that we’ve screwed our customers if we are bankrupt
Even in the best case, it’d be much simpler to raise cash through usual investment mechanisms, so you do have to wonder how viable their business strategy is if they can’t get money that way
Do you maybe have a link for the lifetime plan? Because I cant find it.
Ah there is a big lifetime promo link in the homepage, thanks
de rien
Nowadays I’d recommend a simple postfix + dovecot setup. If you care about a web-UI and possibly some groupware functions put SOGo on top.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System Git Popular version control system, primarily for code IMAP Internet Message Access Protocol for email IP Internet Protocol SMTP Simple Mail Transfer Protocol SSL Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption TLS Transport Layer Security, supersedes SSL VPN Virtual Private Network VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
8 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 3 acronyms.
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I use mailcow for self hosting.
Just switch to mail in a box.
Step 1: cut a hole in the box
The answer bad self hosted apps isn’t less self hosting.
Fasmail + domain
I use docker-mailserver with sendgrid as smtp relay
I found myself in a similar situation last year. MXRoute’s lifetime plan works well for those domains that just need basic email and not a lot of storage.
I have used https://migadu.com/ for over a year now with no problems. Very happy with them. Setup is well documented.
Most reasonable pricing I’ve seen for a family use case.
Great configuration, very flexible and fill of features. They make it easy to get all the DNS records you need to add to your domains and they have a diagnostic tool that checks that everything is set correctly. They even include wildcard aliases (which I’m not sure if it’s mentioned in their public pages).
Should also note that they don’t limit accounts, domains, aliases or any features, just overall mails and storage space. The only additional limitation on the lite account is inability to set account quotas.
This was the provider I went with after self-hosting my mail for 7+ years on an OpenBSD VPS. I feel like Migadu is an honest and good-value service.
Additional: It’s paid, and you need a domain.
Edit: spelling
I use iRedMail but would I call it simple? No. Mail is such old tech that simple really isn’t the word for it. Archaic, ancient and dying fits better. But it will take decades more to actually die. iRedMail is available as a single container, which isn’t correct from a container perspective but makes everything a lot easier in my opinion. Of the various solutions I’ve tried it’s the one closest to the goal of “It just works”. The biggest downside is the manual steps often needed to upgrade version. Not to time consuming but far from “It just works”.
Why should email die as opposed to evolve?
Eh, I guess it’s a Ship of Theseus kind of thing. So much in the core is roten that if we change it you could argue it will be something different.
Sure, but my point is… sending electronic messages, or electronic mail; why would this practice die?
Traditional snail mail has died. For bills and other important documents there are better, digital, solutions out there. Mail has too many security issues to be the answer for that. What do you get by email today that couldn’t be chat message, an entry in a RSS feed, part of a social media feed or a to do item of some sort? 95% of my mail box is newsletters and ads. The rest is order confirmations from various sites. But none of that needs to be emails imo.
The only real, proper use case, these days is work related communication. But even there chat is often the better tool and email lacks because it’s fundamentally insecure and to make it secure you run into the problem of having to set it up between domains, and if you’re already doing that kind of work why not decide on a more secure by design communications channel?
I think in the future communication solutions like Matrix that can talk to (virtually) all other solutions will enable us to move away from email, but it won’t happen until we get Matrix like solutions for task management such that I can send someone a task without having to care about which solution they use at X company, and it will still land in that system. Once we have something like that mail won’t have anything going for it. That really is the final use case.
I use Zimbra with an external email gateway that only accepts authenticated email. Zimbra is pretty heavy (it’s intended to be a Microsoft Exchange replacement) but it at least has a huge amount of protection built-in to deal with spam and comes configured out of the box to not relay (well, outside of you setting up aliases and lists.)
That said, it’s not hard to find “incoming email only” configurations that deliver to local mailboxes only, for most email servers. The thing to avoid is having a single server configuration that tries to do both - accepting external email and sending locally originated email out. The configurations do exist to do that, but they’re confusing and tricky.
External email gateways… that bit is hard. I use a mail server I set up myself on a VPS. It does not listen on incoming port 25. It requires credentials. I did this largely because I was trying to send email out via Xfinity’s customer email relay, but the latter kept upping the authentication requirements until one day Zimbra just couldn’t be configured to use it any more. And each time they changed something, I wouldn’t find out until I noticed people had clearly not received the emails I’ve sent out.
VPSes are problematic as some IPs are blocked due to spam. There’s not much you can do about it if you’re stuck with a bad IP, so if you can find a way to send outgoing email via your ISP’s outgoing email server, do that. For Postfix, you can send out authenticated email using something like: in main.cf:
relayhost = [smtp.office365.com]:587 smtp_sasl_auth_enable = yes smtp_sasl_security_options = noanonymous smtp_sasl_password_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd smtp_use_tls = yesand in /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd:
[smtp.office365.com]:587 example@outlook.com:hunter2So in summary:
- Consider an email-in-a-box solution like Zimbra, I understand the wish to go for something light but it might make sense if your aim is just to control your own email
- Regardless of whether you do or not, use separate servers for incoming/outgoing email.
- For incoming email, lock it down to accept local email down if you’re manually doing this rather than using an email-in-a-box solution like Zimbra.
- For outgoing email, use authentication and avoid it listening on port 25. Consider either directly using your ISPs, or if that’s not practical, configuring your outgoing email server to relay in turn to your ISP (see above for how to do this.)
Good luck.
