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Email questions
What is the best non-gmail, free email service?
If I run my email off of my own vps, could I run a backup replicated email server from my house if VPS service went down if I have Comcast home Internet service? I don't want to get locked out of my account if the VPS host of me email if my vps service gets shut down for some reason.
Comments
You can run a replicated email server in your home, but do not put this server in production state (aka act as mail server) because home ips are not the best for this purposes...
You can run an email server in a vps and the best solution is to have one or two (it depends on how critical your emails are) backup servers in different location.
Also, instead of running a replicated server in your house, you could think of keeping always on an off-line mail client (like thunderbird) and download the emails (if you can control all of the accounts).
But, have to consider this: email hosting is one of the trickiest jobs in the hosting industry nowadays, because it takes a lot to configure the server having perfect deliverability (from rdns to dkim etc.) and, asking those question, you seem not to be capable to administrate and run a service like this...
As of good gmail alternatives, take a look at gmx, or (if you are not scared because it is a russian service) yandex mail. The last one has for free almost all the apps that are having the functions of goole apps, including the ability to use your own domain (yes, for free).
Running a mailserver at home isn't recommended. Most ISPs block port 25 on residential connections and their ToS may not even allow hosting servers.
Best bet is to get an HA cloud server for email; have another LE VPS act as backup/queuing relay. Keep DB & data backups at home.
Best Regards,
Pavin.
@jvnadr, I already have a functioning mail server so I can receive emails for a vanity domain, and it was easier for me to get setup than a web server. I just want a plan before I go all in and move my accounts off of gmail. I don't see how I am incapable for asking questions, unless everyone in IT is perceived to be more knowledgeable if they start at the presumption of omniscience.
If you don't want to read advises, then why are you asking in the first place? How to setup a mail server can be found in millions of google pages.
Now, with this response you seem even more incapable to setup properly a mail server. Receiving mails is the easy part. Keep it alive for receiving and sending, without in a short time gmail, yahoo and especially MS block your ip and your mail domain, is the harder one.
Saying that setting up a web server is harder than setting up a mail server, gives some more points in incapability.
And when you ask if you can host an email server in a residential ip (at your home) makes you look the king of incapables about hosting.
P.S. No one is incapable on asking questions. Only to understand the answers (got it?)
Assuming you've already ensured that rDNS, dkim, spf, etc. are in place and correct...
Separate email and web, meaning, don't host websites and email on the same server (IP). Website scripts (forms, etc) are frequently exploited and used to send spam. An exploited web script will ruin your email reputation in 5 minutes or less. Personal email accounts should never, ever be hosted on the same IP as websites that send mail.
Understand what an "open relay" is, and ensure your email server isn't one.
Develop good incoming spam filtering, at the MTA level and the content-analysis level.
Be aware of the mail your server is sending: messages sent per day / per hour, bounces per day / per hour. Investigate bounces and understand why they happened.
Develop guidelines (for your users) for sending mail and monitor for abuse. A personal mail server should not be used for mass-mailing and if it is will only be grief for you.
Never create direct off-server email forwarders, e.g. all mail to [email protected] forwards to [email protected]. Instead, create an email account [email protected], spam-filter all incoming mail, and only if it passes then forward it to [email protected].
...
Once you done all this then the likelihood of your server being terminated by the provider for "abuse" is greatly reduced.
Then you can proceed to figure out how you'll guard against:
By simply replicating your server to another VM (at a different provider) and setting up cron jobs to replicate data, you can protect yourself. Yes, there will be a delay before you can bring services back online, and potentially some minor data loss (depending on the frequency of your data replication). This is where you need to decide how much time & money you're going to invest in achieving an enterprise mail service.
I've been wondering for a while about server-to-server imap replication, i.e. a vps script periodically copying stuff from primary imap to a backup. This probably exists or should be doable. That would let you read email from the backup when the primary is down. You'd have to figure something else out for sending.
Migadu.com has a free plan where you have to use your own domains. Unlimited domains and storage but maximum 10 emails per day sending, and they put theirblurb into each outgoing signature. That might be a good place to put the backup, so you can read from there and send a few messages if you have to. Upgrading to a paid plan removes the blurbs and increases the limit (pricing goes up with amount of mail you want to send).
I decided a while back to stop looking for free email. Better to just pay for it so the provider is looking out for you instead of their advertisers/data miners/etc. Fastmail is excellent but expensive. Mxroute is cheap and LET-friendly, though for now rather bare bones. Migadu is slick though on the expensive side. I have a 25%-off-first year promo code I can send you by PM, but it's not exactly cheap even after that.
This would be better implemented as an HA system (HA filesystem + instance recovery) since its realtime and there is no wastage of compute resources. In order to read from an IMAP backup, you would need to replicate DB, email data, have a second IMAP service, etc. Besides, the main drawback is the user would have to configure the same account on two different servers in their email client. This would also present additional problems with syncing the new files in any folders on the backup IMAP service back to primary and vv.
Pavin.
That's the idea though, to be able to live through a total failure of a server or provider, like db replication. HA file systems are usually run with on multiple servers operated by the same host, I thought. Yes you'd have to reconfigure your client to use the backup server.
I've had a half-baked idea for a while of using git for email, so you could sync with with "git pull" etc. I don't know how that would play with an imap front end.
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Provider going bust is a very different scenario than uptime/host failure. HA w/ instance recovery takes care of both
Keep offsite DB & data backups for something you don't see coming like provider deadpooling, data corruption, etc.
Pavin.
I don't mean provider deadpool, I just mean they go temporarily offline for some reason, like OVH had a fiber cut at BHS some months ago and the whole DC was offline for over a day. HA installed there wouldn't have done much good.
You guys do realize that mail was once designed to be sent as packets, and not realtime, right?
HA w/ instance recoveryHA w/ instance recovery & anti-affinity
Pavin.
You mean HA across multiple DC's? How does that work?
Same as it would on two different hosts, just that they're in 2 DCs; preferably close by like OVH's GRA and RBX with private inter-DC low latency connection (vRack). For active-active redundancy, the key limiting factor from an LE perspective is cost.
OP should just go with a normal HA server w/ instance recovery and an LE VPS for backup relay (maybe for DB, data backups too).
@willie said:
I thought of making a email format that is like maildir that use LDAP as a backend instead of a filesystem. That why I get all kinds of built in replication. It would probably be overkill for my use. I think I could get away with rsyncing maildir even though it would be slower with a lot of objects.
Email has always moved over packets...in fact, this post came to you over packets...not really sure what you mean here. Even UUCP was over packets.
I suspect you're overengineering here. If your VPS goes down...so what? Is it down for days? Pick a better provider. I can tell you my $5/mo DO node has never been down for a significant period of time.
And if it was...mailers retry...
I suspect your home Comcast line is less reliable than your VPS.
Do you really get such a high, critical volume of email that if it was unavailable for an hour the world would end? Getting to that level of reliability is easy - pick a good provider. Getting to "it never goes down" is an order of magnitude harder.
I've heard about https://pawnmail.com/ , looks like they are decent and FREE. Never tried them though, just wanted to mention them. They allow custom domains.
Personally I use Yandex email service, and it's good, their webmail is also quite solid for the price (FREE), also with my custom domain.
@raindog308 I actually started to explain UUCP, but then decided "Fuck this, it's not worth it."
@raindog308 I actually started to explain UUCP, but then decided "Fuck this, it's not worth it."
Isn't that run by the NSA? Oh sorry, I'm thinking of p0wnmail...
Not 100% sure if is the same you are looking for but you can use nginx to proxy SMTP and IMAP.
For pure replication (two way) in Dovecot you can use dovecotadm tool. Just rsyncing is not recommeded.
For one way syncing rsync works great and if you don't have ssh access imapsync is great too (slower than rsync though) but even more reliable.
For sending just a MX backup will do.