Episode: 4144
Title: HPR4144: Running a Self-Hosted Mail Server
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4144/hpr4144.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 20:12:54

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4144 for Thursday the 20th of June 2024.
Today's show is entitled, Running a Self-hosted Male Server.
It is hosted by Lee and is about 12 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, Experiences Using Iard Male and Male Co.
Hi, my name is Lee.
The subject of today's episode will be running a self-hosted male server.
So why might someone want to do this?
Well one reason would be so that you're not relying on the third party to manage your
data.
This is an entirely true because you still need a server provider and a domain name registrar.
But there is freedom from the potential for restrictions and data harvesting by the
free email providers that are most popular today.
You can set your own limits for storage size and the number of mailboxes.
It pretty much depends on how much storage you've got on your server.
You can use your own domain names and there's unlimited potential for customization and
integration with other systems.
So why might you not want to do this?
Well for one thing, it might be technically challenging.
There's no help if you break it really.
The email relaying depends on other servers, not just your own.
So as an individual, as it much you can do if other servers won't play nice with you.
For example, the IP address of your server could be blacklisted.
There are things you can do about that, but as I said, as an individual, there's a limit
to that.
The software may be free and open source, but the infrastructure is still cost money.
So what are the prerequisites?
Well as I've said, you need a server.
This is most likely going to be a virtual private server and you'll be running a Debian
or a Red Hat Linux derivative probably.
You also need a domain name that you've registered and to be able to modify the DNS for that
domain name.
So what choice of software do you have?
Well, in principle, you can roll your own, i.e. install any sort of packages you like
and connect them together to workers, a cohesive mail server.
However, this approach is like to involve lots and lots of configuration troubleshooting.
So it's probably easier to use an integrated suite like MailCow or iRedMail.
So what are the main components of a mail server system?
Well, you have a mail transfer agent like PostFix that sends email to and receives email
from other servers.
You probably have an iMap or POP server like DoveCot for downloading mail to a local mail
client on your PC.
You have a web server like Apache or EngineX to provide any web interfaces.
You have WebMail software like RoundCube or SoGo that presents email for a browser.
The server will probably need a database like MySQL or PostgresQL for storing various data
involved in now sending receiving emails and there's likely to be various security tools
to prevent spam viruses and network attacks that you need.
So over the last five years or so I've run two different self-hosted mail servers.
The first one was iRedMail on CentOS and I've used that for about five years for the
WebMail it ran RoundCube although iRedMail can also run SoGo.
And then for a bit less than a year I've now used MailCow on Ubuntu instead.
And this runs in a Docker container and the WebMail is through SoGo.
Now although I've tried both I can't really recommend one over the other because it wouldn't
be a fair comparison by instilled iRedMail a long time ago and I didn't properly figure
out how to update it regularly.
I noted that iRedMail was quite pushing a premium version this might get in the way when
you're reading documentation knowing what tier it applies to, what features are available
on each tier.
Things that I like about MailCow is it runs in the container so it's fairly easy to manage
and it can be updated to the latest version fairly straightforwardly although I'm sure
iRedMail can too if you know what you're doing.
So my experience of self-hosting, first what I use it for, I don't use it as my primary
email.
For that I use a popular free WebMail service and I use that only for contact with people
who actually know what work with.
I can't really afford to lose work emails due to any technical issue in my mail server.
The self-hosted email server I use for companies and organisations such as an online store
or a service that's likely to send marketing or such as a utility company or if it's
a one off interaction.
So I use a different email address with its own mailbox for each organisation.
Sometimes I'll share an address between companies, for example if it's for electricity bills
I might use the same address even if I change energy provider.
Typically I don't monitor any of those mailboxes day to day.
So how have I customised it?
So actually I've done a bit of customisation on my server running MailCow and I've done
the similar thing with the one running iRedMail.
So this is what I have.
I have a script that generates a new email mailbox every time I sign up to something.
So just typing what it is like Linux magazine for example.
It will generate a randomised email address which also contains an indication of the date
which is useful for knowing when I signed up to something.
The email address would be something like Linux hyphen magazine hyphen D37 hyphen 0624 at
mydomain.com.
The script will also generate long and complex random password.
And although it's a slight security no-no, typically I'll use that same password for both
logging into whatever their website is as well as logging into the webmail interface for
that mailbox.
Although I can always change my mine later and change the passwords if I think I need to.
The script saves a new email address and password in my password manager because I don't actively
monitor those mailboxes.
I also wrote a script that runs in the cron job to create a digest of all recent emails
in all the mailboxes.
This just has the sender mailbox, subject date and first few lines.
So it's easy to glance through this digest every now and again and see if anything jumps
out at me as requiring attention.
So now talk about setting up mail cow.
Now set this up in the terminal, logging into a fresh event to instance.
I haven't made detailed notes and my shell history doesn't go back that far, but I will
look at the MailCut website as a reminder.
Firstest and preliminary to do, to start with they want you to sort out whatever file
we're using so they're required ports are open.
Then they suggest making sure the time is set up properly on the server so you'll be
using NTP for that probably.
Then sorting out DNS, I would have set up DNS with my domain registrar that should
be at least an IP4A record and an MX record and they also recommend auto discover or
an auto configure records because these help when setting up a mail client and then some
extra text records are recommended for SPF and DKIM which help prevent email spoofing
and it means your mail actually gets delivered rather than ending up in spam.
So once all that is out of the way, mail cow can actually be installed.
First job is installing docker if it's not already there.
I guess podman might have conceivably been used instead but I was pragmatic and used the
container systems specified in their documentation.
The next step is cloning the mail cow's dockerized repository and finally running docker composed
to bring in dependencies and start the various components.
With that and any troubleshooting it would have been up and running.
There would have been some work to do on the web interface to set things up and I imagine
I also had to sort a few things out to get lets encrypt to work properly so I could log
in directly over the web rather than having to forward a port over SSH.
What was fun was creating a script to put everything out via redmail and then put all
the same data back into mail cow.
So then there's updating it and with mail cow they provide an update shell script that's
run manually and it has a few options as to what it does but assuming there's no problems
the script handles everything and at the end mail cow is fully up to date.
So what you actually see with mail cow when you navigate to the web interface on your
domain you can log in and then add mailboxes and you can even handle multiple domain names.
I have this web interface protected with second factor authentication with the ubiky.
There's also a link on the front page that opens the webmail which I mentioned is called
SOGO and there is possible to log in to a particular mailbox and read emails and also send
emails.
I haven't bothered to set up a mail client on my local pc and I always just use the
webmail and in fact I've deliberately blocked the iMac ports they're not being used then
it's best to have them closed.
How well is all this worked?
Well in terms of junk and marketing on the plus side that don't have to manually sift
for an inbox of bills and marketing just to find the emails that actually need my attention.
I think this due to Google's anti spam as well as the European general data protection
regulations which have made companies a bit more disciplined in how they carry out email
marketing.
But leaving my personal email aside in terms of the mailboxes on my self hosted server
having all the different utilities and services compartmentalized certainly helps to hide
all the clutter that generally fills up most people's inboxes.
I admit there are other ways of achieving the same thing for example Apple devices nowadays
automatically offer to keep your email address private and provide a forwarding address
to give to companies instead.
Also there are a number of email services both free and paid that provide email aliases.
As I mentioned at the start there are a number of reasons for self hosting and unlimited
alternative mailboxes is just one of them.
So in terms of reliability for the most part once properly configured their mail server
just runs itself and does so reliably.
It was true of iRedMail and it's true of MailCow.
I did have a few issues with receiving certain emails a few years ago.
For example the ones Apple used to provide two factor authentication.
This was quite a pain because I couldn't verify something to do with my developer account
which put things on hold and required me at the time using my clients to developer account
instead of my own.
Apart from that I've not had many problems with self hosting and even that issue has
not been a problem since.
Other issues related not directly to iRedMail or MailCow but have come about with my own
scripts and customizations on the mail server not working sometimes and requiring debugging.
So it's probably less hassle to use third party plugins directly designed to extend the
mail server in some way rather than having to create and maintain your own.
So that's all I really have to say in summary I've talked about reasons for self hosting
email and generally what is involved and what my experiences have been.
If you want to find out more about the particular mail server suite so I've mentioned they
can be found at iRedMail.org and MailCow.email.
I hope this is something you found interesting and maybe you've tried it before or maybe
we'll try in the future.
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