The comments all seem to be from people who think making an artisanal choice is a bad thing. There should be more art, experimentation, and expression in computing. If we've outgrown running our own mail servers as a practical choice, because there are now more good options, and we can enjoy running a mail server as a more humanly choice, that's a good thing.
Not much has actually changed about the complexity of running a mail server in the last 20 years --- if anything it's gotten easier. What's changed is there are other, polished, turn-key options now. Great. (Those options tend to have spam policies that aren't friendly to the independent servers, but that's life.)
I don't think artisanal is necessarily "bad", but we should all acknowledge that it will be more work for a result that's maybe better but probably worse for most people.
I ran my own mail server for 20+ years, finally giving up a couple years ago. I strongly disagree that it has gotten easier. As the article makes clear, it's a much more complicated world. Things that have happened in the last 20 years include SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and the rise of providers like GMail. And if you really care about owning your bits, in some ways colocating hardware has gotten harder now that VMs are hugely dominant.
The new requirements to be a good mail server are significant work to understand and implement. The feedback loops are also poor: it's hard to know whether you really have them right.
But the real killer for me was opaque major providers like Google. Occasionally, they decided they didn't like my little mail server. I and a number of other sysadmins couldn't find anything wrong with my setup. But mail wouldn't arrive. I even had SRE friends inside Google and they couldn't find out anything; apparently the GMail folks are very secretive.
There are only so many missed business opportunities and disrupted personal relationships I was willing to put up with for my personal taste for running my own servers. Eventually I hit that limit and switched everything over to Fastmail. For me personally, it was a great decision. It's cheaper and more reliable, and never again will I have to get up in the middle of the night to go to a colo. In contrast to my spending a few hours here and there, they have a whole full-time staff sweating deliverability. It's great!
If people think running a mail server is fun, I say go for it. But even there I'd strongly urge them to consider whether "this looks fun" is the right spirit to bring to anything important to their lives, and whether it will stay fun when it breaks at the least convenient time. So maybe keep it fun by using it only for things that don't really matter to you.
> Things that have happened in the last 20 years include SPF, DKIM, DMARC
Right, of course. The protocols are more complex. (Add TLS, MTA-STS...) But whereas 20 years ago you _had_ to start from scratch and understand the whole stack, today that's just not necessary. There are numerous projects that make running a mail server readily possible without knowing e.g. the sendmail configuration macro language. And there are many many more good resources to learn it all if you want to know than there were 20 years ago. It is both a more complex technology and also undeniably easier for people to actually do it.
I wrote the email chapter for the book "Internet Secrets" in 2000, and I ran my own mail server 1997-2019, so I have a pretty good sense of what the landscape was like then versus now. QMail and Postfix were both out before 2001, so you didn't need to know sendmail at the time. You just had to be able to configure the mailer to get things up and running. And given that there were decent Linux distributions available, the technical challenge wasn't high.
The difference now is that from there, there's a lot more to understand if you actually want your email to get anywhere reliably. It's complicated, subtle, and much harder to resolve problems when you get it wrong. At the time, the biggest problem was bounces. Now deliverability has become a dark art.
Just out of curiosity, when did you start running your own mail server?
I think around 1998 or 1999. I don't think we disagree on the facts: I totally agree that there is a lot more to understand and that deliverability is a nightmare. No question. What I see is that today people can achieve a reasonable mail server while being an expert at less.
Hey! Thank you so much for MIAB. I've been using it for personal and business email since May of 2016. It has been an absolute joy to use and administer. I am truly grateful.
Not much has actually changed about the complexity of running a mail server in the last 20 years --- if anything it's gotten easier. What's changed is there are other, polished, turn-key options now. Great. (Those options tend to have spam policies that aren't friendly to the independent servers, but that's life.)
Choose to be artisanal.
(I'm the primary maintainer of https://mailinabox.email/.)