How to Host Your Own Email Server (for free)

hey everyone this is tony thesis tech i'm tony and in this video i'm going to show you how to set up your very own self-hosted email server for free we're going to be using something called cyber panel and you know for the longest time i resisted making this video because i personally know how hard it is to set up an email server in general now not only do you have to get the emails sending and receiving properly but in order to have your emails not be sent to the spam folder at the destination you need to make sure that all of your dns records are in place like the dkim records the mx records the ptr records all that stuff blah blah blah but the reason we're doing this tutorial today with cyberpanel is because it takes the pain out of generating those records by hand manually there is literally done with a click of a button so it really simplifies the process of setting up the email server now i don't want to make it sound like it's super easy because there are still a lot of steps and this tutorial video will probably be longer than most of my videos on this channel but my guarantee is that if you stick around to the end of the video watch the full thing all the way through by the end you will have a working email server where your emails don't get sent to the spam folder because we properly configured everything the way it should be now the one aspect of this the email server itself is free right it's open source software cyber panel is you can actually look at the source code on github or something like that but you will have to pay for to host it if you don't already have a server set up at your location maybe you'll have to sign up for some type of vps which is what we're actually going to be using in this video i'm going to use a linux server i'll walk you through that process as well but that does not have to be the case for you you can use any ubuntu server or any other type of server that you want in general so with all that out of the way let's go ahead and get on into the tutorial here we will start out in lynnode which is the server that i'm going to be running my email server on again this can be you know a local server on your computer for all that matters so let's go ahead and create a linux here i'm going to create my first layout and what this is if if this is confusing for you at this point this is just me spinning up a an ubuntu server a fresh copy of ubuntu 28.04 so i'm going to choose that here and there we go so ubuntu 28.04 long term support i'm going to put it in fremont california which is the location closest to me i'm going to do a 2 gigabyte ram plan with 50 gigabytes of storage and then i'll type in my root password and i'll add my ssh keys and create that server so um this is going to take a few seconds to boot up but we do have an ip address here and what we want to do with this ip address right away is go over to our domain name registrar the place that we got our domain name from and associate that ip address with the domain name so we're actually going to be in this tutorial taking um we're going to be hosting our own dns server on the mail server to simplify the process of all those dns records that i talked about so that's we're going to start setting up right now so i bought my domain name site1.xyz that's the domain name that we're going to use in this tutorial so anytime i talk about site1.xyz just replace it with your domain name that you want to set up a mail server for anyway i bought this from namecheap here and what i'm going to do is go into the manage section and you know like i said this this will be slightly different for you wherever you bought your domain name from but the concept still is the same what we what we're doing about setting up the name servers is going to be the same thing that you have to do wherever you bought your domain name from so i'm going to come on over here into the advanced dns section and come down to the personal dns server which is kind of like the same thing as a private dns server and i'm going to add a name server here so the name server is going to be ns1 dot site1.xyz and that's going to be associated with the ip address of our server and then i'm going to add another one called ns2 dot site1.xyz and then same thing associated with the ip address ending in 248. so um doesn't look like it's doing anything but if you click on search you'll see that we have those two records set up here now the other thing we want to do inside of namecheap specifically is to come back to the domain section here and instead of when this loads instead of having a basic dns name servers we want to have custom dns name servers and here we will type in ns1.site1.xyz for our first one ns2.site1.xyz we will save those changes so that basically what we did there is we just told namecheap that our name servers is going to be located at the ip address that we told it so we're going to have to set up the name servers on our cyber panel okay so by now i think we can go ahead and check the status of this it looks like it's up and running so let's go ahead and log into that via ssh so we can do ssh root at the ip address hit enter yes we can trust the connection so we can continue and now we are logged into that remote server what we want to do is to kick off the cyber panel install so with the official documentation this is how you do that and i'll have all of these commands in this this video linked down in the description below so you don't have to type them from the screen you can just copy and paste them so um sh we're going to pull down the latest installer script and go ahead and kick off that installer now here it's just checking make sure everything's up to date it is and we're good to go so let's go ahead and do this installation so what do we want to do we want to install cyber panel so let's pick option one here type one and hit enter and we want to install cyber panel with open light speed this is the free version of the lightspeed server um option two is something that you'll have to pay for so we want to pick option one again here hit enter and exactly just do you want to install cyber panel like in full which includes power dns post fix in this ftp server yes we definitely want to do this especially because we want postfix which is going to be the mail server that we're using so capital y hit enter and this next option here is asking us do we will have a remote server meaning do we have a server that is a database server that is external to our server and the answer to that in this case it doesn't really matter but for us it is no so capital n hit enter and do you want the latest version of the cyber panel if you do hit enter i'm going to hit enter or you can specify a specific version and then we're going to set a password here with s hit enter i'm going to type in my password and again and uh do we want memcached it doesn't really matter in this case i'm going to say no just to speed up the installation same thing for redis hit no but if you want those things you can hit yes and i will accept the watchdog here so this is going to go ahead and install cyber panel it takes a good amount of time 5 10 15 minutes so i'll pause the video here and catch back up with you when it finishes all right guys i'm back and the cyber panel installation has finished it prompted me if i wanted to reboot the server so i went here typed y and that went ahead and rebooted the server and now it should be up and online so let's go ahead and check to see if that's the case if we um if we just copy our ip address and open up a new window type in that ip address and hit enter this is good i mean 404 usually is not a good thing but this is good this means that there's something being served on our cyber panel website web server in order to access the dashboard for cyber panel we can tack on a colon 8090 here and that's going to open up well you're going to get the your connection is not private so we can click on advanced and proceed to the the login screen but this is how you are able to log into cyberpanel so if you remember we created a admin user with a password during the installation process so you can go ahead and type in those credentials and then go ahead and sign in and this is the cyber panel dashboard now we're going to do a lot of a lot of things in here to configure our email server and right now there's three things that we want to take care of okay we want to we want to create a website okay we're not going to put an application in the website we're just going to create a website there's no there's not going to be anything served yet okay it's just a website to create some dns records basically okay and then after that we want to add our name server here that we talked about from before so we'll add the name servers here and we will add an ssl certificate for our email server too so let's go ahead and take care of those three things first let's do the website so if you come here to the left click on websites create website or you can uh go through here on one of these right here websites and uh create a website and this is going to be we'll just select the default package here the default owner here there's only one owner and we'll put in the domain name site1.xyz and again this is this is the domain name that's going to be you know if i make an email address tony at site1.xyz that's the email or that's the domain name that you want to put here so site1.xyz um email this is this is just a generic like administrator email so i'm just going to put my personal email here tony tony teaches dot tech and a php version really doesn't matter unless you do plan on hosting a website here i'll just pick the latest version and this is uh this is where some of the power cyber panel comes in so we want to make sure we select dkim support which if you're not familiar um is a critical part of hosting an email server it's one of those dns records that we need to make sure is configured properly so let's go ahead and create this website and again this is not an actual hosted website this is just like a container for a website there's not going to be any applications or html pages or anything like that it's just setting up some dns records for us okay so that was successful check that box let's go on to the next step and create our name server so if we go to on the left hand side or you can go back to the dashboard here that's where you see all the options these options are pretty much listed right here so you can either click in here do dns and then create name server and this is where we're just going to put in the information similar information that we put in where we bought our domain name from so um our domain name is site 1.xyz for me the the first name server is going to be ns1 dot and then site1.xyz we'll do the ip address in a second and then we'll do ns2.site1.xyz for the backup name server and i'm just going to come up here to the url and copy the ip address and paste that in here so this is um this is our self-hosted name server and this should match up directly with whatever you typed in at your domain name registrar okay so we'll check that box as well and now the last thing you want to do is create the ssl certificate for our mail server so we can click on ssl and then mail server ssl over here and the website is site1.xyz this would not show up unless we added that website from before so that's another reason that we created that website and then click on issue ssl so now that's going to take a little bit to do just a few seconds hopefully not anything more than that um i believe this also comes from let's encrypt but i'm not 100 sure this is let's encrypt it's like a free way to get ssls um that's done now yep so it confirmed it does use less encrypt as well okay so we have all of that in place let's just do some verification here see what's working what is ready to go so if we ping site1.xyz we get information back that the ip address is associated with that domain name and that is when we when we're making that ping it's going to go to our our name server that we just set up and let's and we can confirm that with pinging the name server too so ping let's just ping nameserver1.site1.xyz and we see that same ip address come back as well so that's that's good to go now the the next part in this tutorial here actually let's just verify it one more time with a third party i'm looking over here at my my outline here and we want to check the dns status before proceeding any for any any more in this tutorial so if you go to a website called ultra tools and we use their dns lookup tool we can actually see what's going on under the hood with all of our dns records so let's type in the domain name that we're working with in this case it's site1.xyc hit go and now you can see some of the the name nameserver records and some of the a records some of the other existing records that we have set up so far so we have our ip address here um a text record for our mail server which is great that that was automatically created for us we have um a bunch of other records like the name server records here that we configured when we have another mx record down here excuse me and then the same thing for um the other name server down here so that looks good and we can actually proceed uh what i'm going to do is pause the video here real quick just so i can understand what the next step of the tutorial is and then i'll catch back up with you when i'm ready alright guys so this next part in the tutorial is setting up a reverse dns server and this is a very important part of this tutorial it's not something you want to skip over and basically go what an uh what a reverse dns server is is being able to look up a ip address based on a domain name whereas like typically you're able to look up a domain name from an ip address so it's just the opposite of a typical dns server and and where we're going to do this is within linode where we set up our initial server so let me let me just walk you through the process here so back here in lynode we want to come under the networking tab and by default they have a reverse dns setup for something under their domain name here we want to set this up with site1.xyz so we can come in here and edit the reverse dns settings and hit er not hit type in site 1.xyz here and save and as long as everything is configured properly it will go ahead and save that information and when i say that as far as your dns server is configured properly it'll be able to accept that value so right here we want to check with a similar third party tool uh the status of the reverse dns lookup so we can use something here we'll open up a new tab called mx toolbox and they have a reverse lookup tool and we can hit enter to check that out and i'm going to type in site we can't type it's a reverse lookup so we have to type in the ip address so let me grab the ip address which is back here so this ip address ending in 248 we want to type this in we want to get back site1.xyz and this does take some time to to propagate so we do see the the old reverse dns domain name here um this i you know it varies it could be anywhere from five minutes for this to update up to like 48 hours so um i'm going to pause the video here and i'll keep checking the status of this but when it's finished we can make sure that we have site1.xyz here and then we can proceed with the tutorial so let's pause and i'll catch back up with you when that happens okay guys i'm back about an hour later and the reverse dns propagation has finished so as you can see here on the screen the reverse dns is now associated with site1.xyz which is perfect that's exactly what we want so we can go ahead and proceed with the tutorial and what we're going to do next is to create an email address so let's go into the cyber panel and come down to email and create email so i'm going to make an email for myself so we'll associate it with site1.xyz it'll be tony at site1.xyz and just for the sake of this tutorial i'll generate a password and copy that onto my clipboard we'll use that and create this email that's created very good that was really quick so let's go back into the email section and access the webmail now we can log in tony at site1.xyz and i'll paste in my password remember me hit enter to login and here we go so this is our email inbox uh let's test this out let's see if we can send an email message so if we go to new message um i'm gonna send it to tony at tony teaches dot tech subject and uh will be actually think i have something over here i have a pre formatted email so i don't just sit here and type it out for you guys so just uh whoops didn't want that put the body down here so dear tony this is an email to test out my new mail server blah blah blah cheers tony okay so let's make this window like a little bit smaller and i'm going to bring in my mailbox for tony at tony teaches text we can see this happen in real time pretty much um or however long it takes for this email to send so let's go ahead click the send button here and as everything's set up properly that'll go ahead and send and within you know a few seconds we should see a pop-up and we do so here it is this is from tony at siteone.xyz to tony tonyteachers.tech and google even recognizes this as important which is good good sign that it's not spam and it is using the the encryption that we have set up for it so that's that's really good um it works so we'll reply actually we'll use one of their canned responses here glad to hear it we'll send that back over see if we can not only send messages but receive matches messages too and there's a little bit of delay because of the the ability to undo the sending of emails but if you want to refresh it uh see if it pops up we can reload the message list here and there it is there's a response coming back from gmail to our custom email server glad to hear it okay so that's pretty much all set up there's one other thing that i just want to show you guys that maybe you'll find useful as a tool in the future and that is the ability to test the spamminess of your emails okay and we can use a a free service called mail tester so if you open up a new tab here mailtester.com like i said test the spamminess of your emails if we send an email to this email address we can check our spamminess score so um that's a big part of this because of all the dns records that are that we were working with and that we've been talking about it's a good idea to know what other i guess email servers think of your email server as far as spam because that's a big problem today is spam with emails and that's what makes it hard to set up these email servers so i'm going to use the same template that we did before for our email so i'm just going to copy that in and paste it in here and we'll send the email the test email to that test email address and that's on its way over there we can come back over here check our score for this and it takes i guess 15 seconds enough for this wooden paddle boat to get over to the palm tree and we'll see how our score looks and cross our fingers that we get a 10 out of 10 and we got a 10 out of 10. so there's a little bit of improvement i guess and that is just based on the fact that we don't have a list unsubscribe but that's okay we got a 10 and a 10 for our email server so that's great i think that means that we set everything up properly with cyberpanel guys i know this was a long tutorial if you have any questions let me know in the comments below i'll do my best to help you out and if you've got any value out of this video whatsoever please give it a thumbs up and subscribe to this channel um i make these videos for you guys so uh in in this one specifically for a lot of you asking for this type of video um so i hope you appreciate it thank you guys for watching i'll see you in 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Channel: Tony Teaches Tech

Views: 86,081

Keywords: free email hosting, free email server, open source email server, hosting your own email server, open source email, self hosted email, mail server hosting, host email server free, make your own email server free, free open source email server, how to make your own email server free, host own mail server, host your own mail server, setup own mail server, how to make own mail server, how to setup your own mail server, run your own mail server, how to host your own mail server

Id: 8G93NVWkXZk

Length: 22min 52sec (1372 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 17 2020