Well, consider I’ve run my own mailserver on one of those domains since 2001 so I’ve had plenty of time to “grow” with it. I have no issues with GMail and the like but as I said my domain has been around a long time and so I may well be grandfathered in a lot.

Having said all that, even with my newest domain (less than a year old) I don’t have any issues so long as I make sure to comply with all the caveats around ensuring my MX records are good, making sure my DMARC, SPF, DKIM and even PTR and reverse DNS records are all in place (the latter is one a LOT of people forget when self-hosting but reverse lookups are a big deal with mail). The amount of mail that my mail server spam-buckets from domains with only forward lookups and no reverse is astounding. But having said that it’s a GREAT way to block spam.

Finally, mail on residential IP blocks or even a lot of cloud provider blocks are just plain not good for mail hosting. One of my MX hosts is on a Linode which gets blacklisted periodically in one of the less reputable blacklists, but it usually doesn’t affect mail flow all that much. I do subscribe to services to monitor for blacklist listings and delistings for my IP’s as well mostly to keep track but it’s handy to know if there might be something wrong with your mailserver.

Mail hosting isn’t for the faint of heart… but once it works it pretty much just works. My primary personal domain I haven’t changed anything in a couple of years… and I’ve had no need to change much with the mail server itself. It comes out of the box with some nice secure settings and it’s kinda nice to have two decades of mail I can refer back to on an IMAP server :)

No, that’s what I’m using. Thankfully it works fine and I don’t worry too much about security because I just leave it turned off until I need it. The “/droppy” url directs to it but if it’s off then it just throws an error back.

Oh jeez… there’s quite the list. I have a Ceph cluster of 3 nodes with 15x HDD’s and 3 SSD’s… on that cluster I run some VM’s that in turn run a Docker swarm. All Ubuntu 22.04, all commodity hardware. Currently I’m running;

• NGINX which proxies all my web facing services on multiple websites.
• Wordpress for my personal site which sync my Instagram pictures to it as well
• MariaDB Galera cluster
• Nextcloud for file sharing but also provides lots of plugin services like a password manager, email client and so on
• Photoprism for my photos… I use the Nextcloud client to automatically upload new pics from my phone to Nextcloud then Photoprism is attached to that same library
• OnlyOffice as a plugin to Nextcloud to allow O365-like functionality
• ElasticSearch plugged into Nextcloud for full-text searching
• OpenProject for project management in my own businesses
• Jellyfin and Plex both attached to the same media library
• E-Mail using Docker-Mailserver… so Postfix with a bunch of ancillary tools for 3 domains
• Droppy as a quick-and-dirty file repo for when I need to get files to people easily
• FreePBX (Asterisk) with 4 extensions around the house
• MeshCentral for managing my family’s PC’s and also doing remote tech support for family, friends and customers as necessary
• FOGProject for imaging PC’s and VM’s as necessary
• ReactiveResume
• Docker Registry set up as a caching proxy
• YoutubeDL-Material
• Karaoke Eternal for those nights when you just get drunk enough to karaoke

Then there’s a whole host of ancillary services; BackupPC, Unifi controller container, piHole on a couple of Raspberry Pi’s, ts-dnsserver for internal DNS management… probably a dozen other containers and tools I’m forgetting.

Oh yeah, and a Synology NAS as a backup target :)

Thankfully I had the foresight to install Expanse a few months ago and it has been dutifully downloading my data all this time and puts it in a nice searchable GUI. Might be quicker than waiting for the download LOL