For years, I’ve been thinking about starting a series where I explain everything I self-host, with snippets and up-to-date instructions, batteries included. This is the first part of “The Definitive Selfhosting Guide”, and I wanted to tackle the hardest topic first: email.

Running email has been, by far, the most challenging part for me over the years. There are many production-grade setups ready to go, like mailcow-dockerized or docker-mailserver, and for a good reason: Mail servers are notoriously complex and have many moving parts. It’s easy to miss mail on your own server, but even easier to send messages that never end up getting delivered anywhere. But it’s not impossible. And if we want to save the Internet we’ve come to love, I think it’s imperative not to leave the playground to a handful of big providers that don’t want individuals to participate. For that reason, amongst others, I run mail servers for my business, a charity I work for, and for myself - no third parties involved. Mail servers also have become my pet peeve, so much so that I talked about it at easterhegg23.