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--- email [2025/03/02 16:23] – willy
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-====== E-Mail Concepts ======
-While the e-mail is one of the most ancient internet protocols, like DNS, it has been integrated with many pieces and bit over the decades to evolve it to an usable state today.
-E-Mail has tons of issues, like spam, abuse and plain brute-force attacks on top of no default encryption and limited overall security. To address most of these issues over the years new protocols and standards emerged, like DKIM, SPF, DMARC and so on. The basic SMTP has been integrated with TLS/SSL to provide wire encryption, and the ancient POP3 is nowadays replaced by IMAP and even JMAP.
-===== Preamble =====
-Hosting an email server is **not** a simple task. Historically it was a matter of setting up tools like [[http://www.postfix.org/|Postfix]], [[https://www.dovecot.org/|Dovecot]], [[http://www.opendkim.org/|OpenDKIM]], [[http://www.trusteddomain.org/opendmarc/|OpenDMARC]], [[https://spamassassin.apache.org/|spamassassin]], interface them properly and fine tune a bunch of settings using decade old syntax and overall pretty hard. Add that you also had to understand and setup various DNS entries and deal with stuff like blacklists...
-One important detail: you **need** to host an email server on a real public and static IP address. No dynamic IP or port forwarding will really work properly. I will show you how to host your email server on your //external server//. A different point relies in how to forward emails generated by your //home server// to your external server, and it is described [[email:forward|here]].
-===== The available solutions =====
-While today there are a few all-in-one solutions that could greatly help you with the process, i couldn't find one that actually worked as well for me as the manual stack composition.
-I tried the [[services:stalwart|Stalwart Mail Server]], because it's an all in one modern solution, probably the most promising **new approach in town** for email hosting, but after fiddling with it for two weeks i had to give up because my external server is not powerful enough or it is not (yet) optimized enough to handle my mail volume.
-I also tried [[https://mailcow.email/|mailcow]] which is a ready made containerized solution encompassing all the above tools. While it's indeed a great tool, after trying it out i hit some issues and overall it didn't feel quite the best approach for me. It is heavily dependent on Docker, and while i use podman, i couldn't figure out if some basic errors i faced where due to the use of Podman or other unrelated issues. In any case, i gave up shortly after wasting on it a few hours.
-If i have to use Postfix and Dovecot, today, then i can go back to how i hosted my mail for the last 20+ years and do it manually once again.
-So, my solution is to implement the mail stack with the good old tools, and i will show it [[email:hosting|here]].

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