Ask HN: What is the state of self-hosting email in 2026?

Mail-in-a-box (https://mailinabox.email) on Ubuntu Server which installs Postfix, Dovecot, nsd, NextCloud, RoundCube, nginx, spam assasin, postgrey ... and a good admin panel.

Mine runs on an Intel NUC at home, with the a sensible ISP who naturally can provide a fixed IP address (everything open), IPv6, and clean address.

Been very happy with it, both the software, and the independence :) A little IT and network knowledge is useful if you're doing more than the standard (VPS) install, but that's to be expected.

I have self hosted side 2001, mostly opensuse, with postfix, but the IMAP etc has changed over the years, now using dovecot. Yes its a pain, yes it takes effort, but just like some people spend there spare time painting, I run my own email server.

I've been self-hosting for almost 20 years.

However, my server went down many, many times for hours without me noticing, sometimes for days.

Despite today's outage, it's still more than worth having a third-party company like Google or Microsoft handle your email. At least they have monitoring 24/7 and people on call to fix issues when things stop working.

Many good answers. But I was wondering how you guys appeal to the Big Two (Google and Microsoft) if you end up in either their publicly known or secret spam lists? Especially the latter seems to be a problem despite having set up spf, dkim, dmarc correctly.

Same. It is not the server or hardware. It is where the email lands and what they do with your email based on the metadata.

I've been running stalw.art in a Docker container for past couple of years and it has been a low-fuss affair, but I'm the only account.

Haven't tried it myself but https://stalw.art/ looks interesting

Hetzner even has a straightforward guide to setting up a self-hosted mail server: https://community.hetzner.com/tutorials/setup-mailserver-wit...

I'm also considering self-hosting email, but pretty much everything I've read suggests that keeping your emails out of spam folders is a huge pain. Still exploring different options.

Linode and hand the keys to Claude. It sets up dkim, dmarc, spf etc and will guide you through processing dmarc reports. Interestingly it's better than the previous (hand tuned over 15 years) setup in that even hotmail manages to receive email now.

I'm running https://stalw.art/ hooked into my SSO hosted on my k8s cluster

Some emails end up in spam some don't, quite frankly I just need it for system alerts for my self hosted services

nixos-mailserver[0] + ZohoMail as an outbound relay.

Works like a charm!

[0]: https://gitlab.com/simple-nixos-mailserver/nixos-mailserver

Hetzner is not cheap anymore. They tripled their pricing.

postfix, dovecot, rspamd on debian stable, with lots of custom configuration. The main problem is not really the server side or getting it set up right, if you know what you're doing, but outbound delivery if you're sending SMTP traffic from any kind of bulk hosting/VPS/VM/colo provider. No matter how impeccable your spf, dkim, dmarc is.

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