No.

I would say absolutely not.

If you have a home lab you’ve probably got devices that sent e-mail alerts so you could try running something internally to see how you get on.

I think some older devices don’t have authentication and can only work internally.

For yourself as an experiment sure, but don’t fuck around with your family’s email.

I used a guide to setup an email server on couple of vps, and I have been running this for 7-8 years now. Adding additional features and security implementations. My servers are scoring max scores on all test I could find. Allowing me to have freedom to do with emails and domains as I wish to. And it just works. I would not change my setup for anything right now as I would see it as a downgrade.

You need to understand a lot of things but it is doable and once all is setup it just works, as long as you follow up on things like domain and certificate renewals.

I am even considering moving my mail server to my homelab… just for fun, as I still would have a backup smtp on vps.

After trials and errors, I find it good to work on as a hobby project / just for fun, but not for your day to day emails. In my case, my SMTP server literally only runs for my printer that has a scan-to-email feature on it, wouldn’t trust it for anymore than that

Is there a docker container mail gateway I just need to send mail from monitoring app

Always fun to do if learning but in production even for personal i would recommend you pay for something like startmail or mailfence and use their custom domain features.

i learned exchange on my own and even had dreams of doing multi tenant exchange until exchange online came and jerked off all over that dream

I’ve run my own mail server for over 15 years. If you’re going to do it, put it on a VM at a reliable cloud provider, such as AWS. You wouldn’t want your email to go down while you’re on vacation for a week with no way of fixing it. You need to make sure you use a static IP that you keep forever, because your mail server builds reputation and the IP must not have any reputation of spam that has landed it on block lists.

It’s not difficult if you let reuse someone else’s hard work to make it secure and keep it updated. This project is fantastic: https://mailinabox.email/

Would I recommend it? It’s more rational to bring your own domain to have it hosted by Microsoft or Google, but doing it yourself is more fun and flexible, and possibly cheaper depending on how many users and domains you will be hosting.

I for myself can say yes.

It is much cheaper than a package on a ISP, where you pay monthly your Domain and most time have limited mailboxes.

Why should I pay 10 or more Euro for my ISP, getting randomly mailboxes without DNSSEC, DANE, DKIM and so in, when I can get all of this for monthly 5 Euro. Ok I pay actually arouns 8 Euro, but have a fully featured plesk, which is nameserver for my domains, yes I said DOMAINS. I have all actually security features working, all my domains are best rated by security checks, have automatic reputation check and prevention.

So why pay 10 or more for mid-class ISP mails or around 8 Euro for full featured own plesk, where I can host as much mails, subdomains and other.

Ok, I’m an IT person, but my configuration isn’t that complex and also I dont have to do time taking maintainance, because plesk is automatically updating most things.

I do. But the domain I use it for is occasional sending. If it was for my job/business probably not.

I do not notice any delivery problems though. What you will need aside from DKIM/SPF, is a static IP and the ability to create reverse dns records.

I have Comcast business and I was surprised they did the reverse dns for me, but it has been working great. I get 10/10 on mail-tester.com.

Doing it for the experience and lab of it? Sure.

Doing it to actually use, fuck no. Email is the most vulnerable part of any org. You need to have a proper spam filter, dmz, web domain, several DNS records, certificates etc in order for mail to even flow in and out. It’ll just be a headache and there are so many free options.

If you want your own special email domain, get suite for 1 person at 12 bucks a month and have it all just work.

Nay, emphatically. Out of the box, a new SMTP server is treated by peers as yet another spam delivery vehicle. You have to prove to the world you’re not a fly-by-night spammer. There are certain things you have to do with your domain’s MX record, as well as in terms of SMTP server configuration. Oh, and if you’re ever caught with an open relay on port 25, that will get you blacklisted instantaneously…

There are a lot of things that are fun to lab. Email is not one of them, seriously— leave this to a cloud provider.

The day Exchange stopped being one of the things I had to manage was a good day indeed 😅

I keep seeing these posts and have a question, is it possible to host an internal only email so I can get notifications from pfsense or truenas scale?