You Should NOT Host Your Own Email Server

today we're going to talk about reasons why you shouldn't run your own email server I do a lot of server setup tutorials on the channel email is by far the most difficult one to get right and get working and it's becoming increasingly difficult in recent years to the point where some even quite experienced professionals are giving up trying to do this I recently came across this blog post by Carlos feneloso he'd been running his own email for 23 years and he's finally actually given up a lot of the reasons I'm going to cover in this video but I'll link to this blog post in the description as well also one of my favorite subreddits are self-hosted there's a really good post about why you really don't want to self-host your own email server I'll link to that one too let's talk about the first and most obvious reason usually it's just blocked when you sign up for a server provider Port 25 is going to be blocked and you just can't just sign up somewhere and start sending out a bunch of email that looks like you are a spammer so they don't want that on their servers you have to contact their tech support explain what you're trying to do and they may or may not allow you to send email out of your server the same with residential IPS if you try to build a server in your garage in your bedroom turn that into an email server your ISP is not going to allow that it's just going to be blocked out of the box and what if you do go ahead and find yourself a place that does allow email to send out things like ovh cloud and contabo will allow you to send an email out but what you find is all of these IP addresses have probably been targeted by spammers already because that's a cheap and easy way of sending out millions of emails through a provider that allows that kind of thing so even if you do get it working there's a chance your IP address has already been blacklisted before you've even tried anything and your delivery rate is going to be terrible you're just going to and up in a Spam box or junk folder or usually not even delivered at all which leads me to my next Point even if you do get it working and you get it working well it's still never going to be quite as good the deliverability is never going to be quite as high as what you'll get from somewhere like Microsoft Google or Apple those big providers they have much more level higher levels of trust and the inbox rate is going to be just so much more effective through these major providers which is just an unfortunate reality of how the internet has progressed in recent years even the big professional email sending services like mailjet and HubSpot still don't have a great delivery rate they allow email marketing but um still a big chunk of it doesn't get delivered about 20 doesn't get delivered 15 will end up in spam five percent is going to get rejected these are the Professionals in this business and they still really can't get close to 100 so you can't expect setting up your own email server to even Piada reached these levels of deliverability so expect if you try to do this that your results are going to be even worse than this and so quickly you can see that this is not viable for any business critical use and even if you're doing a personal project that you're putting actual work into I think it's too annoying to actually try and self-host email if you really want decent results and besides crappy delivery rate there's also a bunch of risks that come with hosting an email server especially when you allow other people to use it friends family co-workers clients this just opens up another big can of worms that just make it not uh worthwhile doing it at a small scale so what if someone gets malware on their browser and they're accessing the email box or if someone sets up forwarding that forwards a bunch of spam from one address through your mail server your server can get blacklisted it's easy to get blacklisted and through no fault of your own and there's often no way of knowing they've been blacklisted as well some blacklists are public a lot of them are not you may never know why your deliverability rate is uh good or bad or whatever so yeah The Accidental damage to your IP or your domain is possible and of your control so and besides that there's also the risk having a bunch of personal uh information and communication on a server that you're responsible for you probably don't want that responsibility um in a lot of jurisdictions where there are penalties for privacy breaches and liability for hosting this kind of data on a server a lot of times you just don't want to have to deal with that so with all the nasty stuff out of the way I think let's talk about what are the options for business critical applications Microsoft 365 just seems to be the industry standard most businesses are already using Microsoft 365 for the office package anyway so they're already paying for it so in those cases just use the Microsoft Outlook email that you get with Microsoft 365. that is very high quality the alternatives are Google workspace and Apple iCloud so Microsoft is around seven dollars a month you can save a little if you pay yearly a Microsoft family will actually give you multiple accounts for a pretty good price as well so that's worth checking out Google is similar starting from six dollars and the one I think is quite good value is actually our Cloud plus from Apple why Cloud plus starts from only one dollar a month for 50 gigabytes this actually will let you do five domains and you can have three addresses per domain as well so this one is quite good on a budget um Apple have excellent uh deliverability themselves so check that one out too if you need to scale up more with a higher number of users there's agency packages on siteground name hero that will let you have unlimited number of accounts and domains so that can be useful if you're doing a um like a WordPress web design agency situation that will solve that issue for you quite elegantly as well and if you're not interested in those siteground or name hero type bundles there are some specialist email services that can help in those situations like MX route Mega do and mailcheep they have affordable packages when you need to host many users and domains so MX routes really popular with web agencies you get 10 gigabytes for 49 a year Unlimited unlimited email accounts so we can scale it up as you need in terms of storage megidoo is very similar and MailChimp again these are similar sort of services that specialize in mailboxes genuine mailboxes you can't use this for marketing newsletters Outreach this is just for genuine email okay so this is popular with this sort of services are popular with web design agencies who need to provide a custom email for their clients so I'll link to those in the description I'm not affiliated with any of those I just thought I'd make you aware of them and finally if you're still here and you're still watching this and you still really want to run your own email server what I'd say is use an SMTP relay so that your outgoing mail goes through a another IP address rather than your own server so something like brevo mailjet Amazon SES that can handle your sntp relay I've got some tutorials particularly the recent digital ocean tutorial I did we'll show you how to do that with cyberpanel and I've also done that for Hestia control panel using Oracle Cloud's free tier hosting as well so I'll link those in the description and I've also made a video of email tips that can help you improve your deliverability rate I'll put that on the end screen that might help you if you really want to host your own email or if you just want to make sure that your email is landing on inbox rather than promotions or junks so check that one out too but thanks for watching I'll see you next time

Channel: IdeaSpot

Views: 20,065

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Id: awZoWqJHnBU

Length: 7min 15sec (435 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 07 2023