I know the adage that self-hosting email is hard. I use a third party smtp server to send emails for my Lemmy instance in order to guarantee delivery, for example.
However, other than potential uptime, what are the disadvantages to setting up self-hosted incoming email?
Incoming email is like 99% of my email usage. I’m happy to use a third party mail provider for outgoing email, but don’t see why I shouldn’t simply host incoming email myself.
Thank you <3
The main drawback is having your ip address bound to your domain, which with a whois can equal to your name and address
Maybe i’m just paranoid, spoiled by cloudflare protection
I read that cloudflare now allows you to proxy email as well.
it’s a redirect, and imho doesn’t work very well, at least when i tried i got too many bounces
I don’t see how this is an issue. I would assume self-hosting refers to some VPS at some hosting provider, so the IP doesn’t matter anyways. Of course, if they are talking about hosting at home, then yes. But in this case they’ll probably have a hard time opening receiving ports for email anyways, I could imagine. At least I would block these ports if I were an ISP for end users.
ah yes i made that assumption