After months of rejection from multiple VPS providers and even claude telling me “don’t do it its too hard.” I was finally able to get a self-hosted email server.

“Choosing to do self managed email is like most of my relationship decisions:

  1. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should
  2. It’s messy, complicated, high maintenance.
  3. You’ll regret it later.”

— Louis Rossman1

I still chose to do it :).

The hardest part? Getting the VPS provider to open port 25. I used DigitalOcean previously and probably spent a week back and forth on tickets just to get a rejection as a reply. Initially I thought this was due to the age of the account, since forums online mention success for people whose accounts were active for longer. So I decided to wait a month and a few weeks before opening another ticket and yet again face rejection.

At that point I switched to Linode, hoping the process would be much easier. They rejected me even before I made an account 😑. An issue faced by others as well.

After emailing them twice to validate my account not as spam, I got to even migrate to Linode. From there on it was actually easy and Linode’s support team was very helpful as well.

Tbh, multiple tools and scripts online really help make the process much easier.

This emailwiz script helps initialize dovecot and postfix along with OpenDKIM and spamassassin. OpenDKIM is extremely important in order for the emails to be not categorized as spam.

dkim test can be used to validate the DKIM configurations of the mail server.

For a range of other tests and for troubleshooting mxtoolbox is also very handy.

TL;DR

  • Digital Ocean doesn’t open port 25 anymore for new accounts.
  • W Linode; even though you might need to verify your account (as not spam) more than once.
  • Try making your own email servers, its actually fun.

  1. The above quote is excerpted from Louis Rossman’s video or guide on a Self-Mangaged Life. ↩︎