This thing just keeps on trucking. Closes in three hours. Of course I’m already drowning in technical books & manuals but setting up my own email server is like the ultimate federated social media thing to do, especially in conjunction with open source development using git. Included books:
- Run Your Own Mail Server, in your chosen format
- Networking for Systems Administrators
- Ed Mastery
- $ git commit murder (fiction novel)
- PAM Mastery
- Sudo Mastery, 2nd Edition
- SSH Mastery
If it reaches $85k (unlikely) then Tarsnap Mastery will be included.
Once upon a time I was a senior tech lead at an email service provider, and I know enough to know that rolling your own is a very big lift thanks to the email mafia.
Some recent jwz posts:
Just a heads up, I ran my own SMTP server for a couple domains for a number of years back in the 2010’s and honestly deliverability was always a nightmare since I wasn’t big enough to get my own IPv4 allocation so I ended up using IPv4 addresses that the VPS provider had, and those had serious reputation issues that I had to clean up. Eventually I closed down those business relationships so that I could stop hosting, and eventually set up my SMTP server to be receive only, and pushed all my mail out via Amazon SES (via configuration in my
mutt
config). Really it was so I could useprocmail
for filtering and then also have some very tight reject rules at the MTA (mail transfer agent) so I could block spam.I mean it worked, but it was only for my personal use.
I ran FreeBSD 7 machines with plain old
sendmail
(yikes!) anddovecot
, but at some point I transitioned over topostfix
when the configuration got more complicated. I think it was moving tomaildir
that caused me to move fromsendmail
topostfix