And they can send and receive messages no problem? Fair enough, if that's the case. Every time I've revisited the thought to run my own I kept coming back to the idea of having to monitor blacklists to request your own removal.
They do. I honestly believe personal email is not a problem. I use maddy nowadays (instead of suffering through postfix), but I believe it's not maintained anymore and I will switch eventually.
When it gets hard is when you onboard other people onto your email server. I never did this, but a friend of mine hosted a server for a small group of people (~20 members), and at some point we had problems with deliverability. For example people set up automated forwards to their personal gmail. Gmail hated that, since everything - including incoming spam - was forwarded. We also had a "broadcast" email that was equally hated by email servers.
One obvious issue is that maintaining anything is work. Last year my email server was down a total of 15 minutes (because of load problems on the host) and this was the exact time when an important client decided to send me an email (I only know because he complained using another channel). And that was in a summer, when I was on holidays, and I fixed that as soon as I received a monitoring alert, while sitting on a bench in a park using a mobile hotspot. And that was still too slow. People are really used to reliable email nowadays.
I set up several email servers over the past 10 years (my personal one, my new personal one, one for my small company), and it worked every time.
I think legends about email being impossible to set up are greatly exaggregated.
And they can send and receive messages no problem? Fair enough, if that's the case. Every time I've revisited the thought to run my own I kept coming back to the idea of having to monitor blacklists to request your own removal.
They do. I honestly believe personal email is not a problem. I use maddy nowadays (instead of suffering through postfix), but I believe it's not maintained anymore and I will switch eventually.
When it gets hard is when you onboard other people onto your email server. I never did this, but a friend of mine hosted a server for a small group of people (~20 members), and at some point we had problems with deliverability. For example people set up automated forwards to their personal gmail. Gmail hated that, since everything - including incoming spam - was forwarded. We also had a "broadcast" email that was equally hated by email servers.
One obvious issue is that maintaining anything is work. Last year my email server was down a total of 15 minutes (because of load problems on the host) and this was the exact time when an important client decided to send me an email (I only know because he complained using another channel). And that was in a summer, when I was on holidays, and I fixed that as soon as I received a monitoring alert, while sitting on a bench in a park using a mobile hotspot. And that was still too slow. People are really used to reliable email nowadays.
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