Self-Hosted Mail Servers

I'm running my own mail server for a couple of years now. I'm using postfix and dovecot. I have SPF and DKIM set up and I'm using spamassassin, roundcube.Setting up a working mail server is one of the biggest challenges because so many components are involved these days and you need to make them play perfectly together. I'm against using out of the box VM images / installers because then you don't understand whats going on under the hood. Mail servers are these k

So you don't manage your own mail server :)

I've run my own for 15 years with no problems. So I recommend learning how to set up postfix. If you prefer not to do that, people here seem to praise fastmail pretty uniformly.

Just rent a server with a good company (such as Hetzner) that’s likely to have clean IPs, install Linux and Postfix, and Dovecot if you want IMAP access, read and carefully follow the Postfix documentation, read any of many online guides for setting up DKIM, etc., and you’re good. Once up, it’s largely hands-off. Mine has been running smoothly for over a decade. Don’t believe the FUD.

mailinabox is working perfectly for me. Give it a try if you want something easy to set up and maintain.

Try Mail-in-a-Box. It works very, very well :-)

I've been running my own mailserver for the last ~8 years off a home server.I'm lucky enough that my ISP provides me with a fixed public ipv4.I use postfix as an smtp server and dovecot as an imap server (pop3 is disabled). I run them on Red Hat Enterprise Linux via a developer subscription.So here's the deal:1) learning postfix, dovecot and general email stuff does require some time, but essentially it's an one-time effort, email protocols do not change that much

I've been running my own (and other) email servers for over 25 years. About four years ago I switched mine over from sendmail (with a bunch of add-ons like spamd/spamassassin, rbl, etc.) to mailinabox. Mailinabox is full-featured, secure, and reliable. It doesn't take anywhere near the level of effort required to maintain vs. other solutions.

I've had very positive experiences with Mail-in-a-Box for exactly the sort of situation you describe. I think it's a great project that pulls together other packages very nicely.I was fed up with configuring everything constantly and tuning this, that and the other. These sort of threads always seem to have plenty of people who have a bad time running their own mailserver (and of course your mileage may vary), but I don't really have to touch it at all.

If someone can't run their own mail system, what do you recommend? Are there better options?