Hosting an email server is pretty sure a magnet for half the Chinese IP range.... So I would refrain from hosting that myself.
this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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I figured email would be a common theme. I’m just starting to dip my toes into all of this, so an email server is not on my to-do list (and may never be).
Google and other large scale providers have intentionally made it very difficult to self host your own email. It’s generally not considered a wise move these days and is very difficult to maintain.
Why do you say so? I'm not an expert in the fields, but isn't a mail server pretty much the same as 20 years ago plus DKIM and SPF?
Problem is, that most larger providers sort your mails to spam if the domain is not well known to them, which is not easy to achieve
- My own search engine (a meta search engine like searx-ng would be fine though)
- a tor exit node, because don't want to deal with the legal hassle (i run snowflake on multiple machines though)
- a SMTP relay (recieving email is easy. Sending email is a pain in the ass)
Backups. Cloud services like Backblaze B2 are so cheap for the durability they offer, it just doesn’t make sense for me to roll my own offsite solution with a Raspberry Pi at my parents’ house or something. Restic encrypts everything before it leaves my machine.
Password manager- it’s too important and it’s the thing that has to work for me to recover when I break something else. I’m happy to support Bitwarden with a few bucks a year.
Email- again, it’s mission critical and I have a habit of tinkering with things and breaking them. And it’s just no fun. The less I need to think about email, the happier I am.
That's what "1" in the "3-2-1" backup strategy stands for, a true offsite backup (preferably continent where you do not reside) For "2" I would still deploy a local offsite at someone's house for quick disaster recovery.
Downloading your 10TB data from B2 (or even requesting a tarball HDD from them) is costlier than recovering from an offsite backup facility within an hour's reach.
Minecraft. When I started out it was fine but when I began to get regular visitors I got DDOSed for days on end and people poking me for ssh access. Never again.
Been using mine using docker behind an extra vpn container...works beutifully..
A public Matrix server. Its just a never ending black-hole of ever increasing storage requirements and the software is too buggy to not become a maintenance hassle.
I do run a Synapse server for bridging purposes, so I am not just talking in theory.
XMPP is safer and lighter anyway
And so damn easy to self-host in general. Ejabberd is batteries included down to offering stun/turn for audio/video calls, Erlang is just unrivaled when it comes to hot reloading so updates are effectively zero-downtime (unsurprising considering all the business critical environments it's deployed).
At first (and especially because I went with Matrix originally) I wouldn't think of self hosting all my instant messaging, but in retrospect, ejabberd is one of the easiest services I've got to maintain. I highly recommend everyone to give it a shot, especially to all the matrix refugees to whom it was a surprise/disappointment.
Nothing really. I'm comfortable hosting mail, chat, my passwords and important documents. However:
Hosting personal/important data for other people is a bit intimidating because you kind of guarantee for safety and availability.
And services that are likely to be misused for illegal stuff and would be too bothersome. Otherwise i might host an anonymous spam eating email-forwarder, maybe a tor exit-node and a forum where adults can practise free speech. But that kind of stuff just attracts the wrong kind of idiots.