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Email!

Posted on 2017-11-16 by Nick Thomas

Email sucks

It really does, and yet we still need it. I've been hosting my own for over a

decade now, although for the bulk of the time I outsourced most of the mail

server smarts necessary to do so to the excellent Symbiosis virtual hosting

package, although I switched to @tomav's docker-mailserver about six months

ago.

=> Symbiosis | docker-mailserver

Today, I finally switched to running my own mail server, directly on the server

with no third-party configuration or any docker. "But why?!" cried a friend

desperately, pointing out the existence of Mailcow and Libre.sh,

in addition to the options I'd already tried.

=> Libre.sh

The mail server setup I wanted had two requirements:

• Use as few system resources as possible
• Be as unobtrusive to the rest of the system as possible

Both of these requirements are tightly linked to where I self-host my

email. Normally, servers are hosted in datacentres with big, fast Internet

connections. About 2 years ago, I noticed that home Internet connections are

quite fast enough, thank you very much; since then, I've mostly been running

email on servers sat at home. In York, I used a standard rack-mounted server

that hid in the larder!

In Shetland (more on that another time), I've switched to an

APU2, which also happens to be my router, website, and everything else as well.

Yes, this post was served from Shetland!

=> APU2

Being tiny and multi-purpose, a heavyweight mail server solution wasn't an

option. In particular, no Docker. It would be absurd to install Docker on a

machine acting as a router. And in any case, I was always terrible about

rebuilding the containers to get fixes for security issues - I'm too used to

The good thing about docker-based mail server setups is that they are very
self-contained - it's just a few files in `/var/lib/docker`, in the end.
non-docker mail server solutions like Symbiosis or Mailcow have an unfortunate
tendency to try to take over the whole machine. They come with piles of
dependencies, maybe a database and web interface you have to hook up, config
files modified or added across the system. It's not pretty. You also tend to
be stuck on older OS versions for an extended period as the vendor takes a while
to port their octopus-like solution to the updated system.

## Make it better?

I use Debian on all my personal hardware. It's rock-solid and comes with lots of
useful software, with very useful default configurations. I also have a set of
Ansible recipes I use to automate setting things up on those machines - you can
view them on the link below.

=> https://debian.org
=> https://ansible.com
=> https://code.ur.gs/lupine/ansible-personal

So, I resolved to create a minimal set of Ansible recipes that would get email
working simply by installing Debian packages and modifying their configuration,
with as light a touch as possible. You can view what I ended up with in the

• Exim4 SMTP server
• Dovecot IMAP server
• amavisd-new + spam-assassin

Everything gets solid TLS support, using certificates issued by LetsEncrypt.

It's quite rare to have a mail server with valid certificates! In any case, if

someone wants my email archive, they'll have to serve the warrant on me to

get it. And the APU2 is small enough to hide under a floorboard or so, if I

turned out to be really paranoid...

=> LetsEncrypt

TODO

The anti-spam setup is extremely rudimentary, and will likely need a lot of

extra work. I'll see how much spam comes in and adjust accordingly. Ultimately,

this was the most disappointing part of the setup - it's Perl-heavy and it took

a lot of head-scratching to work out how the different parts even fit together.

There's no webmail. I'm OK with that.

Dovecot has solr and lucene search engine integration. I doubt either will fit

onto the APU2, but I'll evaluate it.

A long-term ambition of mine is to put together a vertical slice of email

functionality as a single, neat daemon that's optimised for the small, single

domain use case - a sort of Caddy for email. It could even use JMAP and database

storage instead of IMAP and Maildir, ship a HTTP server, and handle the tricky

DNS parts too.

One day. Until then, this setup is working well enough. Give it a try!

=> Caddy

Questions? Comments? Criticisms? Contact the author by email: gemini@ur.gs

=> mailto:gemini@ur.gs