What is Reddit's opinion of
Mail-in-a-box?
From 3.5 billion Reddit comments
100 reviews of this app found across Reddit:
It may be easy to set up for you or me, but I wouldn't call it simple. And mail servers do follow the Murphy's law closely. Having your mail server die mysteriously when you are on a business trip is not a fun experience.
This is very good advice except for 2. Running and maintaining https://mailinabox.email/ on a privately owned server has been trivially easy for me and I have very little experience in Linux and CLIs.
"Not a sysadmin, use linux as a hobby"
Please don't jump into this lightly. A lot can go wrong.
I built my own docker image to run my email, syseng for a living, but https://mailinabox.email/ is highly reviewed
> curl -s https://mailinabox.email/bootstrap.sh | sudo bash
NO! No no no no no no no. Do not pipe things from the internet straight into a root shell. I don't know how this trend got started, but holy shit is it bad.
Most of what I use isn't in the official repos, so it's more a lot of wget and manually downloading things. But I always install:
Python 3.7 from source DBeaver CE Google Chrome Keybase Newset GoLang from source
On my servers, though, it's easy. Just apt-get to install curl, then mail-in-a-box.
You can rent a cheapo Ubuntu VPS for $5 or $10 a month, and setup your own mail server with mail-in-a-box, which is stupid-simple to use. It automates literally everything, including renewing your SSL certs with Let's Encrypt. If you can do nothing but ssh into a linux server, you can do this.
Is this founded on your being more comfortable troubleshooting linux mailservers, or on an assumption that it's got to be easier? Exchange isn't really a bad option for the what you're replacing it as.
I'd go with Zimbra, though, it's the least-disappointing thing I've ever migrated anyone off Exchange onto.
https://mailinabox.email/ is great if all you want is the email bit, but if you've got a working Exchange server then chances are people are using calendars and contacts and all the other groupware good stuff.
FreeIPA can do some of the AD stuff (like auth) but not the GPOs that you don't need, if you run a fileserver then you'll probably want some sort of centralised auth.
To avoid getting caught in spam filters you can either rent a vps and hope that the ip you get isn’t blacklisted (there are some blacklists for ip ranges owned by cloud providers), or you can use a service like outboundsmtp. There are more providers for relaying smtp, but I personally use outboundsmtp, because it’s free if you don’t send more than 1000 mails per month. For setting a mail server up you can use something like mail-in-a-box. The most time consuming part for me is, like any server I set up, maintaining and securing that thing.
After some ten+ years running my own, I recently switched to https://mailinabox.email. So far, I'm happy.
Tiny speed bumps, mostly caused by myself being stubborn (I've always done it this way, mailinabox should do it my way), the setup is very robust and reasonably easy to setup. Very easy if you are experienced in Linux sysadmin (and not too stubborn).
Run your own email server. Look into mail in a box. I think that's what it's called. I'm running one on a vps, which can cost as little as a couple bucks a month. You can get a domain for a buck a year.
I have a mailinabox server running on a DigitalOcean instance for my personal email @lastname.com, which also supports sending mail. Trying to send mail from a consumer ISP's IP address block is futile; nothing will take it.
Pasó es que lo pensé compa jajaja https://mailinabox.email/ No es posible, aunque dudoso, que Yoss hubiese quedado libre si efectivamente el control de plazas. No es cierto, que si tienen el mismo pasillo, y es inteligente != ser inteligente De hecho es un subreddit los únicos inútiles en 2021 capaces de justificar sus disonancias cognitivas 😂.
Use mail in a box.
Almost idiot proof and handles all the TLS and DKIM crap mostly for you. You still need to add the txt records to your DNS and that can be a pain but Mailinabox is the easiest email server I have ever set up.
Selfhosting emails can be a pain.
I personally run mine with my ISP (they also maintain my dns). They also provide spam filters and some various checks
If you are looking to selfhost, check out mail-in-a-box https://mailinabox.email/
Here's a guide to choosing the right email. I would recommend Tutanota though.
​
You could host your own email - Mail-in-a-box.
Or you could just run it yourself, which is what I do. The simplest way is probably Mail-in-a-box, but unfortunately that doesn't seem to implement CardDAV, which OP would want for synchronising contacts across different platforms.
My own stack is fairly simple:
- Ubuntu Server (a Linux distribution) for the server. This could be hosted on a cloud server. Any mainstream Linux distro will do: Debian, SuSE, Fedora. Don't go for Arch or Gentoo unless you want a hobby; don't go for Kali at all.
- Exim 4 for the MTA (mail transfer agent - the sw that shuffles email from server to server). Easy to set up, and once running doesn't require any attention.
- Courier IMAP SSL as the IMAP server - used to give incoming email to the email client. Also set and forget
- Apache 2 web server - needed to support...
- OwnCloud - provides CardDAV (contacts sync), CalDAV (calendar sync) and WebDAV (file sync). OwnCloud is a pain in the neck and requires more attention and maintenance than the rest of the system put together, but it does work.
- Lets Encrypt crypto certificate used by Apache, Exim and Courier. Getting it to work with Apache is embarrassingly easy, but getting Exim and Courier set up right needs a little thought.
- Bind 9 for DNS - but most people would find it better to get someone else to host DNS for them.
This sounds like a lot, but it's actually pretty easy to set up.
in general, I always recommend disabling all outside access and running an openVPN server. That way you first connect via VPN and then connect to any service you want.
Once you know what you are doing, you have to check each service individually to make sure there are no major weaknesses. Make sure the docker containers only have access to files they need. This is hard because for example the transmission docker needs access to all you drives in order to write but who knows how much security they have? Same for sonarr and plex.
My preferred setup is this:
- get a VPS like digital ocean for $5/mo and install a reverse proxy on it.
- Lots of good info here. Setus a domain with DNSsec. Point IP of domain to vps
- vps redirects everything to your local server. So, the vpn.domain.com is the address you use to connect to your home network.
- setup dynDNS on your router so that the VPS always redirects to your your home address, ie: domain.com->VPS->home.dyndns.com->home IP.
This setup will protect all your services behind a VPN, protects your home IP and you don't need to worry about old/bad services not keeping up with their security.
Openvpn has clients for win, mac, linux, android. All work with certificates if you want extra security.
I also recommend getting a decent router if you want to do that. At the very least, get a $40 linksys and install DD-wrt.
I'm sorry for commenting but not being of much help. But I sailed those waters before and I do not recommend it to anyone. Maybe you should look into something similar to Mail-in-a-Box https://mailinabox.email/
Wish you the best of luck!
I would start with getting https://mailinabox.email/ working flawlessly, and then transplant the setup to a hardened box.
If you run your own mail it is probably a good idea to also run your own DNS (I use nsd/unbound).
Hi I recently installed mail in a box it needs Ubuntu 14.04 x64 as base OS, for me is working great with multiple domains, can handle mail accounts and you can upload your web pages there, check it out !!
I actually tried iRedMail recently on a fresh Debian Jessie instance from Digital Ocean and found almost nothing working after it had finished installing, hopefully you and others have had a better experiance! There is also https://mailinabox.email/ which looks quite promising, but is spefically designed not to be tweakable which turned me off. Runing mail servers is relatively difficult and I would advise against it to people unless they wanted to run one (yay) or needed to for some reason (security, keeping mails on premise etc).
VPS with Mail-in-a-box
Get's set up really quickly.
resources found at their site: https://mailinabox.email/
and of course, you need a domain.
You can get Free domains if you don't care about the TLD (in reddit.com the ".com" is the "TLD") at freenom
You can get cheap .com/.net/.me domains at porkbun.
Avoid anything associated with a country, as they don't allow WHOIS privacy. (.us, .it, .mx, etc)
I've been slowly testing and migrating to mailinabox... runs perfectly fine on the cheapest linode instance, handles multiple domains like a champ. I missed the free $100 of hosting they've been giving away some how, but if you can get that it's 4 years of free email hosting.
Started with personal mail, then routine system mail, and now I've started moving over accounts. Run through a couple migrations and haven't had any issues, backup and restore worked as advertised.
It's not an ideal solution for everybody, but for tech skilled people it's awesome.
I've been running mailinabox: https://mailinabox.email/ ... for at least 5 years for 7 domains, about 15 active users (plus a couple of dozen "system" accounts) on the smallest Digital Ocean droplet and have zero complaints.
Getting a "clean" IP address is as important as which VPS you choose. Dealing with blacklists, etc. Is WAY more of a hassle than anything else you might run into, which is why I went with DO at the time.
MIAB is super, super easy to maintain, has built in backups that are easy to test restore, users minimal resources and is all around awesome.
Hope this helps some.
There's so much to do, and I believe you can do it! Its a good (and useful) hobby that you can work on in 30 or more minutes of free time. Its fairly flexible and the setup and maintenance is fun and educational. Entire jobs are created around most of this if you are interested in IT.
You can self host house-wide synchronized stereo systems, media servers, ad blockers, file storage, [data hoarding](/r/DataHoarder) (backing up sites like Wikipedia is a popular one), game servers, VPNs (for accessing your home network from outside the house), DNS servers (giving your devices domain names like minecraft.local inside your house or over your VPN), personal email server, and so. much. more.
If you use a service online, there's a free alternative for it as either offline software or a self hosted solution. You can almost entirely replace Google with:
- Search: Whoogle Search
- Email: Mail-in-a-Box
- Documents: Libre Office Suite
- Drive: Pydio
- Meet/Hangouts: zipcall.io (recently acquired by a company. This is a link to the last working source code you can host yourself.)
- etc
/r/selfhosted, /r/coolgithubprojects, /r/DataHoarder
effectively, you cannot self-host an email server. unless you have a business account port 25 is probably blocked. Additionally email from almost all dynamic IP ranges will get immediately flagged as spam.
I DO run my own email server, in the cloud. if you really really really want to do this, check out https://mailinabox.email/ I've done everything right, and I've been doing it for a long time. Mailinabox makes it manageable. It's still complicated.
I use DigitalOcean and Mail-In-A-Box for my personal mail. It also configures private DNS servers for your domain and provides a nice front-end and API! Running smoothly for years now.
I use r/https://mailinabox.email/ for that (50+ domains) and it works great. Ubuntu 14 is still the officially supported, but it can also be installed on 16.x (See https://www.linuxbabe.com/mail-server/ubuntu-16-04-iredmail-server-installation)
remember: there are always two sides, you and the receiver, both sides need to be provider that don't collect data.
my annoying solution for this problem is, to be your own email provider (i am using https://mailinabox.email/, so it's pretty easy)
So, I know this isn't the exact answer you're looking for, but you might consider running something like mailinabox. The only reason I mention it is that it takes a bit of the frustration out of running a mail server. I use it personally and haven't had any issues with it yet. The upside is that it also uses letsencrypt to do the SSL/TLS encryption and makes it pretty seamless.
As for the actual issue you're running into w/ Thunderbird, do you happen to have logs, error messages that you could share?
You should consider online.net and get a dedicated server, less money and more options. Also VPS is insanely insecure, the provider and pretty much plop into a terminal on your VPS whenever they want. A dedicated can be configured differently to not allow this.
To answer your question: https://mailinabox.email
Email verification seems broken. I'm running a standard MailInABox setup.
Correction, it barely made it, you should probably tweak some things about your SMTP (rDNS, SPF)
Received: from emsar.innovandalism.eu ([127.0.0.1]) by emsar.innovandalism.eu (Dovecot) with LMTP id yV8nG14eLlbOfQAAvBEecA for <>; Mon, 26 Oct 2015 13:36:46 +0100 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.0 (2014-02-07) on emsar.innovandalism.eu X-Spam-Level: **** X-Spam-Status: No, score=4.8 required=5.0 tests=FSL_HELO_NON_FQDN_1,RDNS_NONE autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.0 X-Greylist: delayed 1582 seconds by postgrey-1.35 at emsar; Mon, 26 Oct 2015 13:36:45 CET Authentication-Results: emsar; dmarc=none header.from=meshbits.io Received: from flarum (unknown [119.9.26.124]) (using TLSv1.2 with cipher ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256 (128/128 bits)) (No client certificate requested) by emsar.innovandalism.eu (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 7E14BBC0330 for <>; Mon, 26 Oct 2015 13:36:44 +0100 (CET) Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1] helo=forum.meshbits.io) by flarum with esmtp (Exim 4.84) (envelope-from <>) id 1ZqgbN-0001Vw-T4 for ; Mon, 26 Oct 2015 12:10:13 +0000
This doesn't answer your question per se, but I've heard Mail-in-a-Box is a great full setup for a Linux server. I haven't used it myself but it seems pretty all-inclusive.
I recommend Mailinabox, especially if your concerned about security. Very easy to run, even if your not comfortable with Linux.
You will have a fully configured Linux Mail server, setup to work right out the box with multiple doamins. It has Roundcube for the webmail, which is great. Owncloud for contact and calendar syncing, plus zpush for push.
The script is regularly updated by the creator and it's configuration files are updated when major exploits are announced IE logjam ect. It's very easy to manage, there is very good documentation on the website about setup and maintinence/upgrading.
You can also take advantage of DNSSEC, if your Domain Registrar supports it.
Just install it on a DigitalOcean droplet for $10 and your ready to go, if you really want to lock it down then impliment 2FA for the SSH login for extra security.
If $10 is too much, it can also be done on Vultr for $5 with a little extra work as they block port 25. So you would need to request for it to be removed and you also need to set Reverse DNS yourself in the control panel as this is something DigitalOcean does automatically.
There are other solutions, but I have found Mailinabox to be the best rounded with out a complicated setup and management. You could also look a Zimbra which is closer to exchange, or iRedMail but they will require more setup and configuration.
Mailinabox is probably the best way to go, I brought a domain the other day but have yet to set it up but I hear it works well and is probably what I'm going to use.
It gets regular updates from the creator and I know he encourages people to look at the config to make sure there is no security holes.
In the end you get a secure mail server, with SPF, DKIM & DNSSEC. It also includes owncloud, for calendar and contacts sync.
You can host this at Vultr for $5 on their 786MB Plan, just drop their tech support a message to ask for the email restrction to be lifted as they block port 25 by default. They did it within 10 minutes when I asked and didn't reuqire any ID.
I've been using https://mailinabox.email for my domain. Just set it up recently. I'm running it on a 512 droplet which needed me to setup some swap space + alter the installation script (it bails out if you have less then 768). So far it seems to be running just fine.
It runs a DNS server for you but I'm not using that bit. Fortunately it gives a nice export page that details the things you need to put in your own DNS server should it be needed.
I have been running my own for over ten years now. It's really not that hard, but you've gotta like being a sysadmin.
I've heard good things about mailinabox: https://mailinabox.email/. I'm planning to move my current servers over to that setup.
Edit: one the most interesting parts WRT privacy, whhen running your own host, is the ability to catchall mail, . When suddenly I get mail from UnrelatedCompany Ltd. on I know they were either hacked or sold my data. I know this is possible with e.g. gmail as , but those mails are often not allowed or can be normalised when sold or leaked.
I have a mailinabox instance on a minimal "Basic" DigitalOcean droplet (1GB RAM, 1 CPU) which uses munin, it hasn't had any issues. I haven't used it outside that context, however. It's also not in a container, it is installed directly on the droplet.
I think they want to setup email using their domain. u/No_Collection9839 You will need to setup a mail server to do this. Your host likely has a free email option for you, but if you want something you setup and manage there are a lot of options for you. Some are easier than others.
Mailinaboxis great, but for more advanced users
​
Purchasing email solutions is an option.
Office365 is one of those option
You can also check on your current host.
Anyone who wants to run their own mail server but is stuck on residential internet can spend about $5/month for a cheap slice of a Linux server and run mail in a box.
I ran this for a few years and it worked flawlessly. Moved over to ProtonMail because I liked their cause.
May not have as many "cool" and/or useful features but mail-in-a-box is rock solid, super easy to setup and administer. I've been running mine for at least 5 years with maybe 5 minutes of downtime total (as my VPS reboots after an upgrade). Never an outage, never a security concern. It "just works". Digital Ocean $5 droplet, I host maybe 25 mailboxes. Love it.
I use MailInABox For your own hosted solution, it works fairly well and will generate the proper DNS records for you. Getting the name server setup to work was a pain for me, but it's fairly turnkey. Should be https://mailinabox.email
https://mailinabox.email/ may be a good option for your situation but I'd highly recommend you don't send email from your own servers and use a trusted platform as a relay. This will save you the headache of blacklisting in the future.
Using a relay will allow you to not worry about any of the questions you just asked because the relay will manage that for you.
Diaspora is probably the best bet if you want it to be like FB...Idk much about the others you mentioned. I know there is an Android app, not sure about iOS. You could run your own pod or whatever they're called, so it could be relatively "private"...the whole idea of social networking is not privacy oriented though. Just stick to encrypted text/email. Hell, set up Mail-in-a-box which comes with nextcloud. Email each other on the same server, share files with each other in nextcloud? Just my two cents, I have been rid of Facebook and other social networks besides Reddit for a while now and never have been happier. Good luck though, hope you get something up and running for you and your family!
> private email services but I'd also like to keep my current clients setup.
If you are able to manage, hosting your own is the best and most secure option available. The trick to managing your VM is securing your VM (Virtual Machine) there are plenty of tutorials out there.Maybe something to keep in your back-pocket for later.
I host my own using Mail in a box a simple script that installs an immense load of tools, latest security practices, tailor it to what you need and it comes with a GUI panel :)
Decentralization is key to a better and open internet. With that in mind you can see how email providers are not 100% secure options, with everything there is risk, but more so when you depend on a company. For example Germany has some of the strongest privacy laws and protection methods in the EU, but the German BND and BfV (foreign and domestic intelligence agencies) both partnered with the NSA and used resources like XKeyscore. Look at the Hushmail, Lavabit as examples etc.. Services (centralized) like these are also more prone to attackers as it has incentive compared to hosting your own. Just something to keep in mind.
Burnermail is a simple forwarding service, I don't recommend them as it's crazy simple to set up one on your own and I find them not to be the most transparent / stable. As a another user pointed out, you need chrome for their extension, and chrome should be a no-no, if not already for you.
I don't personally use this, but a good friend of mine has been using this for a number of years now. Anytime I ask him about email, he swears by Mail-in-a-Box.
I've been using Mail-In-A-Box for a while, and been happy with it. It contains ZPush for Exchange stuff (haven't personally used it), and integrates with Nextcloud for calendar, contacts sync, and file storage/sharing.
Roundcube out of the box, and integrates slightly more robust search. under the hood, it's standard Ubuntu.
Cons:
The appliance-like nature makes it a little... kludgy... in complex setups. It's nothing horrible, but it makes assumptions about DNS that might not be valid. Pay close attention to the records it creates.
I prefer to manage my own DNS, but have used the provided defaults successfully on personal mail servers.
Give Fastmail a try. They offer contacts, calendar, and you can BYOD (bring your own domain). Their app is pretty good since you can access your email, contacts, and calendar all at once.
I use the wonderful Mail-in-a-Box to host my own email on a VPS, but you mentioned you don't want to self-host. On my Google-less Android device I use K-9 Mail, Etar, and DAVdroid. The standard contacts app on my phone picks up my contacts via DAVdroid.
You might not be able to run a mail server from home (most ISPs block smtp). However, you can get a cheap VPS and make your own mail server using something like Mail-in-a-box which is very easy to setup.
I looked at mail-in-a-box and decided to go with iRedMail because it included SOgo. mail-in-a-box looks like a very nice set up and looks to be even more integrated out of the box and easier to set up then iRedMail.
OP should definitely take a look at mail-in-a-box's security guide and architecture diagram.
Alright, basically the easiest solution for self hosting an email server is using Mail-in-a-box, which I have personally used. It also allows you to use your droplet as a custom nameserver so it can take care of the DNS configuration for email. Keep in mind it can only handle one domain at a time the last time I checked. That said, I only really recommend hosting your own email if you have a very specific reason. I moved my email to ProtonMail because it ended up being far cheaper for my use case, plus you can add as many domains as you like, and even upgrade to mutliple user support if you want.
I run https://mailinabox.email on a $5 droplet. unlimited mailboxes, or forwards for every domain I have. Comes with spamfiltering, DKIM/SPF via the DNS server, SSL via Let’s encrypt.
I use that box as a primary DNS and in/outgoing mail server for my domains and my domain provider as secondary slave DNS servers. The hardest part was asking my domain provider how to set up the glue records, mostly cause I was clueless about how to use them :)
Please note the $5 box is the bare minimum, if you have a lot of clients who send out 100‘s of mails per day you might want to get a box with more CPU and Memory.
The rest was as easy as clicking and copy/paste things in place.
Those are my favourites: https://mailinabox.email/ https://github.com/sovereign/sovereign
You find a lot of other solutions (many of which I havn't tested yet) here : https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted#self-hosting-solutions
So my experience with it is about 5-6 years ago. but the biggest issue was the database that it uses. it corrupts very easy. I ended up abandoning it the setup and moving over to postfix/dovecot setup with owncloud for the calendar and contacts setup. You can use https://mailinabox.email/ for easy setup of a similar system and this is what I am currently using right now for my mail server.
For security right now, iphones really are the best. Of course, you have to trust apple's long term plans and 'authorized' actions.
Privacy is a different question. The biggest privacy leaks on a smartphone are the apps. Unless you are a specific target of a state, you dont need a super high security device like a blackphone. You need a ROM that's not provided by someone making money off your info, and you need to be careful about your app choices.
That means no carrier Roms, definitely no sanding Roms, and probably not vanilla Android either. Depending on your device there are lots out there, look for an open source rom that you like.
Then watch your apps. Just dont install things that request too much access. If you want to use Facebook, use a third party client like Metal, that doesn't share your info. Get your email through a non google provider that you can trust to have secure mail protocols set up, like protonmail. Better yet, host your own email with [mailinabox](https ://mailinabox.email). Its possible to use your Android phone without a google account on there at all. Use alternative app stores like f-droid.
And on every platform, always always always prefer open source.
Just spin up a server for $10 a month with digital ocean and use mailinabox
You will be saving yourself A WORLD OF HURT
Mailinabox: https://mailinabox.email/
DigitalOcean (ref link): https://m.do.co/c/b02b597cac60
Is this intended as a learning experience? If not, if you're just looking to get mail up and running, I heartily suggest Mail-in-a-box.
After 10+ years managing a qmail server, saying "that's not so hard, it's called simple mail transport protocol amirite?" ... I have come to the conclusion that email is, in fact, hard to do well.
http://iredmail.com is a fantastic open source solution for email that runs on just about every OS. Very straight forward to set up.
https://mailinabox.email/ is also good, albeit less flexible and more geared towards personal email. Unfortunately it only works on Ubuntu
What about Mail-in-a-Box? It is a complete open-source self-hosted solution for an e-mail server and related applications. You can basically choose any virtual hosting service (they actually recommend Digital Ocean) and configure your server with a few well-documented steps.
There's always Mail-in-a-Box.
You just get a small vps from some place like Digital Ocean or Linode (usually around $10/month for one with the right specs) and install that. Its incredibly easy to use, and although there are specific instructions for every step - including video walkthroughs - it does help to be a bit familiar with Linux before installing.
It has a webmail client built in, as well as a calender service. I personaly use Thunderbird to access my mail, and the generic e-mail client on Android.
There are some introductory costs, such as buying your own domain, but depending on how picky you want to be it can be quite cheap. For instance, right now .xyz is going for around $1.50 from Gandi, who also give you a free SSL Cert for your first year. SSL certs are generally another $9-14/year, although StartSSL (and eventually LetsEncrypt) give out free certs.
I've been running it now for 5 months and I've had very few problems with the service. The only issue I've ever run into is when there are a ton of updates available, some things start breaking until you reboot the VPS - generally a 10 second or less problem, at least on Digital Ocean.
Its not as secure as fully encrypted mail - which is incredibly hard to pull off no matter the service you use - but it does at least take you off e-mail services like Google / Outlook.
Plus if offshore hosting is a big deal, you can get a vps with any available company you want in any available country you want, especially if you're looking for specific laws to protect yourself further.
I have a DO email server that I used https://mailinabox.email to configure. It is built to be ran on DO and wants a Ubuntu 14.04 base, iirc. But it configures everything: dkim, domainkeys, SPF, webmail, exchange access, etc. It's great.
It uses nginx as a webserver, and supports running websites from the mailinabox administration panel.
Well Postfix will only let you send emails. You'll need something like Dovecot to receive emails. If you want to access these emails via web interface, you'll need to setup even more things(Roundcube + Apache). It can definitely become a black hole. If you want to get your feet wet, I'd start with Main-in-a-Box. It's the easiest way to setup a working server and it will introduce you to all the components in a very friendly manner. It's not customizable, but it "just works" for most people. https://mailinabox.email/
You should check out mail-in-a-box. It runs on Ubuntu 14.04 (among others), has an easy to follow getting started guide, and offers a few nice features out of the box, like email aliasing (), graylisting, and generating self signed SSL certs (you can update these to be "legit" SSL certs if you want).
>If you are an expert, you can skip ahead if you have a domain name and a completely fresh Ubuntu 14.04 machine running in the cloud. On the machine run:
>curl -s https://mailinabox.email/bootstrap.sh | sudo bash
shudder
> I do love Mail In A Box. It's email that Just Works.
Too bad it seems to want to take over a whole system as well as a whole domain.
Email is a rather complex topic depending on your needs and I am not sure I believe their claim to be able to automate most of it as there are just too many things you need to setup, from Reverse DNS over making sure only one HELO name per public IP is used over DKIM, SPF and DMARC, servers with stupid callbacks which expect port 25 to be open even on sending boxes which are not listed in your domain's MX record, stricter IPv6 sending guidelines for sending to Google recipients.
Sounds like your decision is made, but for those who want an easy self-hosted open source solution, you could try:
I run mailinabox for my personal and business emails. It’s a pretty easy setup and once it’s running it’s pretty hassle free and just needs the occasional updates.
I hace been using Mail-in-a-box for almost 3 years. It's been painless and the set up is done with a single shell script you can download and execute on a clean VPS. It also takes care of all the DNS stuff for you.
I've spent a couple of days configuring mail-in-box (https://mailinabox.email/) and got it running good now.
Anyone here who has good or bad experiences with it? Should I take some other software? I want to use it for most of my customers
Klingt als hättest du die Basics abgedeckt, wenn du noch nichts spezielles ausgewählt hast würd ich für Mail sowas wie Mailinabox nehmen.
Was du noch nicht aufgezählt hast ist Backup, da kann man Borg/Borgmatic empfehlen.
Have a look at mail-in-a-box which worked great for a friend of mine (I'm a bit oldschool when it comes to mail servers and do the whole setup by hand - opensmtpd, rspamd (which also does dkim-signing!), dovecot nowadays, coming from a classical postfix-spamassassin-dovecot setup) but you might need to clean up your installation/reinstall your VPS to start anew to avoid conflicts and/or errors during setup.
May I ask how you messed up your previous installation? It might be recoverable if it's only a configuration issue (and don't worry, we all mess up stuff while learning it, that's part of the fun!)
If you are on Linux + Ubuntu 18 you should try https://mailinabox.email/. Be sure to study the limitations. It's not yet ready for Ubuntu 20. It's prudent to keep mail server separate from your website server.
https://mailinabox.email -- runs on a tiny VM/server and doesn't have a lot of nonsense. Rock solid in production; I've probably got 30 domains on a 2GB VM and it never hiccups.
Set your hostname, set your nameserver with your registrar and then run a one-line shell script and you're off to the races.
Mail-in-a-Box is absolutely the best choice IMHO.
As far as blacklists, it is easy to get removed from most of them, so that is not really a problem. When it is a problem, you can use a smtp relay - there is one specifically developed for MiaB mentioned on their discourse forum.
For many reasons already mentioned it's not worth it to run a mail server from your home, especially since port 25 is blocked.
You CAN run one on Amazon AWS and the free tier is just enough for https://mailinabox.email/. I did that for like a year and just got tired of trying to maintain it.
An alternative is to buy your own domain and sign up for an existing email service like GMail Workspace or Office365 or something like that. You can also take the lazy approach and just forward emails to another account. This is what I do for things that don't require or need a reply. It also works perfect for junk mail and sites that require you to verify an email. You just make a forwarding email and then delete it afterwards. It's also good for homelab trials that block gmail/outlook/yahoo and say "Business Email Required".
There are quite a few:
- https://mailinabox.email/ - Closest to mailcow
- https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver/ - I use this atm
- https://github.com/modoboa/modoboa - Not dockerised last I checked and a little more in-depth
Si lo pensé compa jajaja https://mailinabox.email/
No es por el gasto realmente, porque estamos dispuestos a meterle un poco más en presupuesto a la infraestructura, es tal vez por lo que mencionas en el primer parrafo: las únicas compañias que merecen la pena son Google/Amazon/Micrososft y los clientes no quieren pagar por esos servicios, prefieren algo regalado aunque no funcione bien.
Yo hago wordpresitos y cobrarles un hueso a los clientes por una actualización del software es un p2
Pero si creo que es lo mejor
Another quick question, how do I set up an email server for my clients?
I am thinking of using something like Mail-in-a-Box (MiaB) directly on a DO Droplet, I could then set up an admin account (i.e. [email protected]) then pass the admin portal URL and details to the client. But this is an issue because MiaB admin users have access to server settings, this allows for a possibility where clients can change something and break their email server set-up.
This issue can be overcome using MiaB's API, I can set up a client's portal where clients can log in and change aspects that I have allowed for via the API. But this becomes very over complicated.
Is there an easier way for this?
Maybe I'm overcomplicating this
You can also play with mailinabox.email on Ubuntu. It's a complete email (imap and pop) & webmail server and does a great job with a very active userbase and developing team.
For me as a beginner, I found mail in a box easy to set up, it is much more basic than mailcow and only requires 500 MB RAM: https://mailinabox.email RDNS is recommended as the big commercial providers will flag your messages as spam otherwise
I would seriously take a look at mailinabox https://mailinabox.email
It brings together a fully capable email server built from open source components without the hassle of doing it yourself
It's free, super easy to set up and configure either in a cheap cloud hosted service or in a VM
You need the recent Ubuntu LTS version 18.04 and a static IP. The specs required are really low
It's a one line install. Configuration is from a GUI and there is web based mail built in
I have a fixed IP and run it on a Ubuntu VM on my Synology NAS. It runs flawlessly and requires almost zero maintenance
It does the OS patch management and certificate provision automatically and version updates to mailinabox are a simple one line command.
I was up and running in an hour including testing
Sure - for my VPS I've done the baseline stuff: disabled SSH password authentication and started using key only. I also installed Fail2Ban for both system services and WordPress itself. Fail2Ban monitors logs for repeated failed login (and other actions) attempts and will ban offending IP addresses for a set period of time (default is 10 minutes). I wrote a post about these things on my new WordPress blog here - https://austinsnerdythings.com/2021/03/13/securing-this-wordpress-site-from-evil-hackers/.
For the mail server, I went through the Mail-In-A-Box install procedure. I haven't locked it down as tight yet but do have password SSH disabled - that is #1 for securing a VPS. If you want, I can document how to set up the mail server and send that your way as well. My set up is a bit different than most because I have external DNS (external to the mail server). They recommend using the mail server as DNS but I wanted it separate for redundancy purposes.
Uh well with no logs you have just lost a ton of useful post mortem information when you investigate a potential issue. Your biggest challenge IMHO is protecting an internet facing host followed closely by misconfiguration of the MTA and DNS. https://mailinabox.email/ does a fair job of trying to do both for you and will setup and manage letsencrypt certificates. It can handle dmarc, SPF etc. and you can get dnssec going too if your DNS provider supports it. Your question is too broad to answer sensibly on here. One thing to keep in mind is that using your own domain makes the machines that host your services (email, web, whatever) stand out for interested parties. If you want secure communication for shortish messages where you don't mind the risk of disclosure of who is emailing who but don't want the content read, use one time pads over normal email.
Performance wise, based on geekbench you might get more performance from the laptop.
T420 https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/383
Pi 4 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/2496805
Also I'd definitely suggest getting at least 4 gigs of ram so you can setup caching. Things might run slow on the pi since it's single core performance is lacking compared to the t420. Also, if you setup email, they have an email client that built into nextcloud's web interface that you can use to connect your email, let's say from Google or yahoo. If you want to setup an email server alongside nextcloud, I'd suggest using mail-in-a-box since it'll setup both email and nextcloud.
You can pay for hosted mail like Google, Microsoft, protonmail, zoho. The domain and thus the address remains yours no matter what.
If you want to host your own, then the cheapest and easiest way that I know of is a droplet in DigitalOcean, and https://mailinabox.email on it, but then you'd have the responsibility of backing it up.
Plus using Google services that are integrated is just a lot more fun.
One-line script install and, at the end, you'll have a secure mail service. The default is for the VM to also handle DNS for the hosted mail domains, but you can copy the DNS records over to Cloudflare easily enough.
> Do you know of any way I could achieve a high level of privacy in my email?
For privacy you would want some sort of end to end encryption. Look into PGP for that.
You might find this project interesting:
If you're not afraid of setting up your own email server, then I'd recommend Mail-in-a-box for you.
This is a newbie-friendly email system setup script, with its own control panel. It also handles DNS for your domain (it has DNS authoritative server), and basically is very easy to use.
You can setup as many email accounts on as many domains as you want, on a simple cheap VPS.
I'd recommend a vps somewhere with Nextcloud and ownphotos installed. I use digital ocean personally but there are numerous options, like linode, vultr, and tons more.
For e-mail I HIGHLY recomend fastmail, it's fantastic and inexpensive. I pay I think $5/mo and you can have I think 100 e-mail domains at no additional cost. It's just priced per separate user account. E-Mail is incredible difficult to host yourself, even if you use something like mail in a box. The only other service I'd consider would be ProtonMail, I just don't like that it's only hosted in Europe and I'm not THAT concerned about privacy.
For Google Photos replacement, Nextcloud is ok but I'd recommend setting up ownphotos which includes some really great features like some face detection, automatic location based albums, etc.
You can get a VPS that will run all of this for $10-$20 a month but if you need a lot of storage it will be more expensive. Alternatively, you can find a spare computer or a very inexpensive old computer on eBay. RPi4 will be a little underpowered for running this software, imo.
Not sure how tech savy you are. But how about not using Gsuite and getting a Digital Ocean Droplet and running your own email server using Mail In A Box That way your paying for the server rather then the users using gmail?
I am only going to speak as to #2 as it is my area of expertise.
If you want to self- host email (not really recommended - honestly) take the easy way out and use Mail-in-a-Box, Mailcow, or iRedMail. IMHO, Mail-in-a-Box is the easiest to set up, but honestly is not the best choice for many situations (if only for you / not shared it is great).
OR
Use an Email Service Provider such as MXroute or one of their resellers such as anydomain.email.
You can use IMAPSYNC to migrate the actual email from your current provider to the new one.
If you need any assistance, please feel free to PM me.
If you have your own domain, you could just get a VPS with your own static IP from any number of privacy-friendly VPS providers, get it with stock Ubuntu 18.04, and run Mail-In-A-Box to host your own e-mail. There's very little configuration -- it's designed to be easy enough for people who literally just figured out how to do 'cd ~ && ls' on the Linux command line. If you know enough to just make sure SSH is secure, you can set this up, and it'll be secure and work well. (I'm a big fan of MIAB.)
The only catch is that the IP address you get may have been used previously by spammers etc, so some of your outgoing mail may get bounced or put in peoples' spam folders. So it may be worth while to use your BTC to buy a pre-paid card that you can just fill with fake info, and then use it on a more "legitimate" VPS provider.
There is Mail-In-A-Box or Mailu these are no engines but they do most of the work for you.
I used Mailu myself in a project
You might want to look into one of those email servers in a box you host at home. Totally random and arbitrary example:
Totally random and arbitrary example of the same sort of thing for running on a VPS:
Don't even try sending emails from a residential IP. You'll already be on so many blacklists and be blocked by default by so many IPs it's not worth it. You should instead rent a cheap VPS and host email on there instead. See mailinabox, but also this Ars Technica tutorial.
Any way you look at it, hosting email yourself is not for the faint of heart.
As for everything else, a Raspberry Pi 4 should just about manage that. Make sure that you use and tune Nginx + PHP-FPM for Nextcloud, and don't use Apache. It will run much faster.
Personally I got started with this Ars Technica tutorial myself.
Be warned: locally hosting email is a time consuming process to get it working just right. Also, don't even try to send emails from a residential IP address.
i do this using mail-in-a-box.
$5 a month for a server on Digital Ocean or Vercel, unlimited aliases and your own login under you domain. can give your friends and family addresses too
I'm happy just to login via SSH. Don't need a whole virtual admin setup. With that said I was looking at mailinabox.email and it seems pretty easy. Not sure if it is supported in Debian though.
Yes across the board to all of your questions. I assiduously take care of my mail server (it's also running mail-in-a-box which does most of the hard work)
I just ran your linked lookup tool. 100% green.
Mail in a Box has worked great for us. Easy to manage, easy to setup. I’m currently running 3 mail servers with it, one has 3 users and one has about 45 users; both work flawlessly. Hosting your own email can be a big pain, you’d definitely wanna go the VPS route if I were you. Linode or DigitalOcean are who I recommend.