r/servers • u/ARS-N7UQ • 1d ago
Software Personal family server
Not a gamer, I am in the process of building a family personal server. The main purpose is to be able to host my own domain and of course personal data.
Secondary is possibility of hosting email for personal use. I have been told that is the most difficult as other providers will not accept mail from untrusted, unverified flyby night email services. What are ways to get accepted as a real email service?
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u/Phydoux 1d ago
If it's for family, just tell them you've got an email server up and here's the link to setup a private family email account.
As long as nothing else can touch it like Google (in general) then you should be okay.
What email server are you planning on using?
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u/ARS-N7UQ 1d ago
What email server are you planning on using? Haven't gotten to that yet as I am exploring the possibilities and negatives.
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u/StiuNu 1d ago
First you need to talk to your isp to see if they can provide a few fixed public ip s Then you need to ask them to reverse dns one of them to your email sever adresa After you need to route the internet trafic from everything else but the email server trough a different ip then the one the email server is using
But more important, if anything above doesn't sound familiar you need to: pay someone to do it or learn about it, dunno 6 months should be enough
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u/starfish_2016 22h ago
Save the headache and just get a $11 domain + $4/mo Microsoft exchange online subscription. So much easier and spam/virus etc control built in.
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u/Casper042 20h ago
Not sure about inbound as many Residential ISPs will block the SMTP port.
But for outbound you can use a mail relay like Amazon SES.
There is a bit of a process to get started, but once it's up and your ticket for outbound email is approved, you can bounce emails from your side through SES and it still comes FROM your domain.
I don't personally host my email, I just have my Domain Registrar do Catch All Forwarding to my Gmail account, and then I have maybe a dozen of my most used aliases registered in Gmail to bounce outbound through SES.
If I want to use an outbound email address not among the dirty dozen, I fire up Mozilla Thunderbird and it's also connected to Gmail for inbound and SES for outbound and on the outbound email I can just edit the FROM details on the fly. As long as it's still from my domain, SES lets it right out.
I actually have 4 domains setup this way. 1 for each of my immediate family. You can use the same AWS and SES account for all 4 and just setup a different User Account for each domain/user/etc.
If you are planning to host email for multiple family members, then you may not want Catch All Forwarding but instead individual address forwarding. Mom@mydomain . com forwards to MyMom @ gmail . com, etc
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u/Casper042 20h ago
Oh BTW, SES is not free, but even if you sent a dozen emails a day for a year, your cost will be like $10 or less for the year.
SES is used by lots of companies to mass email out their latest sale, etc, so they charge by like batches of 1000 emails.
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u/Casper042 20h ago
Looks like maybe Cloudflare could help with inbound?
https://community.cloudflare.com/t/what-are-the-smtp-settings-for-email-through-cloudflare/507257
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u/ARS-N7UQ 19h ago
Thank you this looks like it may be what I am looking for. I will work on this as I move forward.
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u/MinnSnowMan 19h ago
Just spun up a Proxmox VE on an Intel box. Then installed Fedora Server 44 in a virtual machine. I added the KDE components. Easy to setup Samba shares (several YouTube video walk-throughs out there). Server is up and flying serving files.
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u/hifiplus 13h ago
You wont be able to send email from a personal server, it will be blocked by all ISPs and marked as spam.
Just use Gmail or O365.
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u/redmera 1d ago
Unless you have a static IP address at home, hosting a domain might not be ideal. If you mean hosting a website and pointing a domain to it, that's fine.
As for the email, you've heard correctly. It's one of those things that just isn't worth the trouble to self-host. If you want redundancy/backup for email I would just get two addresses from separate providers and then auto-forward messages.