[parliament32]

> The days of people running and maintaining their own are pretty much long gone

This is very much a myth. There's a lot of FUD around how mail is "hard", but it's much less complicated than, say, running and maintaining a k8s cluster (professionally, I'm responsible for both at my org, so I can make this comparison with some authority).

Honestly `apt install postfix dovecot` gets you 90% of the way there. Getting spambinned isn't a problem in my experience, as long as you're doing SPF and DKIM and not using an often-abused IP range (yes, this means you can't use AWS). The MTA/MDA software is rock-solid and will happily run for years on end without human intervention. There really isn't anything to maintain on a regular basis apart from patches/updates every few months.

[btown]

I think that there's a mindset among younger coders that "if it's not a modern post-AWS cloud provider, servers will take ages to come online and aren't going to give me full access, that's why EC2 exists." And this is conflated with the myth that running a mail server is hard.

But in practice, you can find any number of VPS providers, running in local datacenters, with modern self-service interfaces, with at least some IPs that aren't already spam flagged (and you can usually file a ticket to get a new IP if you need it), that are often cheaper per month than AWS, and give full root and everything. Find a service that will help you warm the IPs before you send to customers, and you're good to go!

[drnick1]

This is 100% my experience too. Self-hosting email isn't any harder than self-hosting something else and there is no maintenance beyond apt update and apt upgrade. Even if you choose to do this in hard mode using postfix/dovecot instead of a dockerized stack, you can get a working config in a few minutes from an LLM these days.

[tyingq]

I think this quote:

> > The days of people running and maintaining their own are pretty much long gone

Is less about the pieces you've mentioned, and more about reliable delivery without fighting blacklists, ip/domain reputation blackholes, etc.

[jedberg]

> There's a lot of FUD around how mail is "hard", but it's much less complicated than, say, running and maintaining a k8s cluster

The main difference is that you're fully in control of the k8s cluster, but no matter what you do, you don't have control over the email infrastructure, because deliverability depends on the receiver. On every receiver you send to.

People say "I don't have deliverability problems!" but how do you know? Most places don't tell you they rejected your email.

[parliament32]

Meh, one could also complain they don't have control over backbone networks, transit, peering agreements, and intermediary routing therefore hosting a service on k8s is futile without using a managed provider / PaaS.

> People say "I don't have deliverability problems!" but how do you know?

Because people reply to my emails.. because I email documents to family/friends/landlord/etc and they receive it as expected..

> Most places don't tell you they rejected your email.

Of course they do, this is what DMARC is for.

[jedberg]

> intermediary routing therefore hosting a service on k8s is futile without using a managed provider / PaaS.

Except that a managed service doesn't solve that for you. They are no better at that than you are. Email services are better at deliverability than you are, because they spend lots of time building their IP reputations and more importantly negotiating with mail providers to guarantee their emails show up.

> Because people reply to my emails.. because I email documents to family/friends/landlord/etc and they receive it as expected..

I'm guessing you don't confirm every email you send with every person though.

> Of course they do, this is what DMARC is for.

I was involved in the creation of DMARC (and SPF and DKIM) so I know how it's supposed to work, but in the real world, most providers do not honor the "reject" flag and actually send the bounces. Last time I dealt with it was a few years ago, maybe it's better now.

For context, I started my career at Sendmail, and I worked on the SPF and DKIM specs, so I've dealt with deliverability for 25+ years. I also ran my own mail server until around 2009. But I switched to Gmail as my primary around 2008, when deliverability just got too hard. But I still worked on commercial deliverability for years after that.

Granted, SPF and DKIM wasn't widely adopted at that point (and DMARK didn't exist), so maybe it's easier now. But at the same time, most of AWS/Azure/GCP are marked as bad automatically, as well as most home internet blocks.

So if you want to run your own mail server, you can't do it on your home router anymore, you have to rent a server in a rack and get a clean IP that's just for you. That costs $$$.