Self hosted email continues to steeply decline

bell-cot

I see no upsides to a Google/Microsoft duopoly in email. Except for those already-far-too-powerful corporations. EDIT: "I see no upsides to X" means "X is NOT good". (Responses suggest that this was not clear.)

sharperguy

If someone can solve the spam problem in email without just manually whitelisting specific providers that heavily monitor their users, then they can completely reverse the direction of this problem. Unfortunately it doesn't seem likely someone could do that.

glum64

Stopped reading at "The MX record says where the mailbox lives."

petcat

Spam ruined email. It's really as simple as that.

liotier

At this point, self-hosting email is as much a practical convenience as it is a political statement. Or maybe I'm just stubborn.

throwaway67743

I'm sure it's a good article but there is no need for it to be written by an LLM... Is everyone really this lazy now? I don't think I've read anything written by a human for at least a full month.

sandebert

Interesting topic. I wonder if the AI was given notes to base the article on, or if it was given the data and also made the full analysis itself.

kypro

I switched to M365 as my provider a few years back as my emails kept being flagged as spam. I've done it for decades, but I don't know much beyond the basics of email hosting tbh, however my understanding is that these days email coming from self-hosted servers carries a much higher spam/junk risk and so often automatically marked as spam. Maybe there are ways to avoid this happening, but when a few clients all reported that they were not receiving my emails I didn't have much of a choice but to switch.

DogRunner

And on the other side, projects like stalwart email ( http://stalw.art/ ) and mox ( http://xmox.nl/ ) makes it so much easier to build an e-mailsystem on your server.

IFC_LLC

The hardest thing in setting up your emails server is to keep your messages out of spam folders. Even if you are completely legit company that sends out ONLY human-written personal emails, you will get tagged as spam first. I've self-hosted for about 2 months, and promptly switched to iCloud. Just because I've been spending too much time calling people and telling them to check their spam folders. Recently our business moved to another domain. We had a guy who has spent over a month "warming up" traffic, so our new domain won't be tagged as spam by default.

VladVladikoff

20 years of running the classic postfix + dovecot stack for about 10 business domains. I’ve recently been testing out stalwart, with just one company domain, which is nice but seems quite fragile, 4 times now it’s killed itself doing some self updates. If it wasn’t for Claude assistance I probably would have given up on it by now. It is quite feature rich though, but its spam detection is not great, too much ham flagged as spam, not enough spam flagged as spam. 2FA is a nice bonus but for some unknown reason it breaks itself every few weeks and I gotta turn it back off again. If I could get stalwart stable I would migrate all my domains to it.

A_D_E_P_T

I wish there were a way to self-host without my emails constantly getting stuck in other people's spam folders. And it made me really paranoid about email, too -- like I'd send emails, and I'd never know if the other end received them or not, unless they replied. Without a reply, I would always wonder whether the message got a look, or disappeared without a trace. The only way around this seems to be hosting with Google, Microsoft, or maybe Proton. Any other ideas?

gostsamo

Hosting my own server with mailinabox. low traffic, but keeping their random subscriptions, newsletters and occasional single purpose address. Haven't had any issues so far.

gommm

I've been running my own email server with exim and dovecot for 20ish years, I like the freedom it gives me but I have to say it's a significant investment. Not so much keeping things up to date but instead making sure that my emails are actually delivered. I've eventually switched to using fastmail just for sending emails and even with that, I don't get perfect delivery.

avian

> DMARC: adopted everywhere, enforced nowhere in particular Unfortunately this only talks about what DMARC policies are published by domains. I was hoping they will go into some analysis of how many mailboxes actually hard-enforce DMARC rules on ingress (as in, respect the DMARC policy as published by the sender's domain, p=reject or whatever else it might be) I have been hesitant to enforce DMARC rules on my server. Partly because maintaining it was a pain (see opendmarc - maybe better with rspamd now), but also because on my test runs I saw plenty of legitimate incoming mail that simply would get rejected if I were to enforce DMARC on ingress. I suspect big players like gmail have some kind of soft enforcement/reputation/machine learning approach to DMARC, but this is way too much work for a small time admin like me.

FriedrichN

Self hosting is not that hard actually. The problem lies with the big e-mail providers marking your e-mail as spam, even if you have everything configured right (MX, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, etc.) and you're not on any blacklists. They use their mysterious opaque algo to determine that your e-mail is spam and you have no idea what you could do to not get in peoples junk boxes.

bilekas

Mail self hosting is not an easy process to maintain.. If you do manage to get whitelisted you need to ensure you're on top of maintaining it, let alone some larger provider like Google just deciding they don't like you. I do empathise with wanting to self host, I just always found the cost of effort to do so really didn't offer enough benefits versus a good provider like proton for example. It sucks but maybe a fight that's too far gone to win.

logicallee

I run my own mail server, and I am very concerned about its reputation and deliverability. I've run my own Linux server full time since at least 2017, obviously well before LLM's, but only recently put up a mail server. I don't usually run any agents on the server, such as Claude Code, ChatGPT Codex, or Grok Build, all of which I have subscriptions for but don't run on this server. Instead, I manually administer the server using ssh, while getting interactive help from ChatGPT in a chat window. It was complicated to get security, DNSSEC, DKIM, DMARC right this way. I did it just under a year ago, around September 15, 2025. I tried to follow and understand what I was doing, and keep good records on it. It was a complicated process, but everything was up and working at the end and I received email my server sent me. It felt good to be able use this simple script to send myself email: #!/usr/bin/env python3 import smtplib from email.message import EmailMessage msg = EmailMessage() msg["From"] = "(user's from address)" msg["To"] = "(my gmail address)" msg["Subject"] = "(a test subject)" msg.set_content("(a test body)") with smtplib.SMTP("127.0.0.1", 25, timeout=30) as smtp: smtp.send_message(msg) print("Message submitted successfully to local Postfix.") and have it show up instantly in my gmail within seconds. This is powerful. (I've removed the details from this comment.) I understand that as my server's reputation grows, it becomes very powerful to be able to email anyone without any intermediary except potential spam filters. I am very careful about what I put on my server. Nevertheless, I had a recent experience that was a little sad for me. I wanted to forward some mail to my gmail address automatically, and used ChatGPT Sol 5.6 on medium thinking time to help me with the administration to do this. (I find extra high and pro thinking times are excessively long.) I was very disappointed with the results, which included a very badly written regex for authentication. I'll write up my experience in an experience report. It was a big disappointment for me. The burden on administrating one's own email is already very large, and it is disappointing that we can't really rely on frontier models to help with it.

skeledrew

I've been using GMail roughly since it existed I think, and have thought on and off over the years about self-hosting. The notion scares me every time because with it comes thoughts of what would happen if I were to lose the domain name or server, or even if there was an outage at the "wrong time". And then there's also the idea of updating the 1 million+1 services, etc that I used it to sign up for. As much as I'm not a fan of a decent amount of what they've been doing, they're however a stable entity which offers a very reliable service for essentially free. Very likely that many others also think along those lines. The only thing I think can compete with that is some kind of decentralized solution, also something I've thought about a bit. Like a Keyoxide-based[0] - or similar - setup that makes it virtually impossible for one to lose their online identity (since lost keys can be rotated out once one has - access to - enough proofs), and then that identity can be used - without fear - to route associated data, etc. Of course adoption of what could become an adjacent or new standard would be the next hurdle to overcome... [0] https://keyoxide.org/

ubermonkey

I self-hosted for a while in the early 2000s. It was a hassle. My box got hacked -- I'm sure I missed a security update or something -- and while I didn't lose any data because of my obsessive backup paranoia, it was enough of a Thing that I just punted. I used Gmail for Domains for a hot minute, but never really liked it very much. Soon I found Fastmail, and I've been using them ever since (so about 13 years now).