Futo (Louis Rossman) at it again with great content, this time a Guide to a Self Managed life. This 14hrs long guide comes in two video parts, aswell as a written guide for those who prefer. Both video and written quide comes with complete chapters and timestamps. This should be a great starting point for those who have the time and want to start learning from the very beginning.
Video Link to Part 1: Youtube - Invidious
Video Link to Part 2: Youtube - Invidious
Happy selfhosting in 2025 everyone ✨
I get how momentum keeps you on a path, and he admits that he’d rather use OPNsense in the wiki, but dammit, now he’s got a bunch of other people going down the same pfSense road to the rugpull. And man, Wireguard is so much less confusing and difficult than OpenVPN, but because of the drama the pfSense weirdos made with Donnenfeld over the kernel patches for WG, there’s precious little support for WG in the pfSense environment. Wireguard is definitely more noob friendly.
And if you’re watching this because you need this level of help to selfhost, you definitely should not be hosting email yourself. Love Mailcow, used it for years, but I’m a veteran of the spam wars from way back and know how to deal with the current landscape. He is too, so he should know better.
Rule one of self hosting. Do not self host your own email. Only pain will you find.
You of course can, but there are so many additional hoops you have to jump through. I use my main domain for my email, but proton is one of the few subscriptions I happily pay for
I’ve been self-hosting email for so long (and ran/consulted on corporate email systems for a long time), I’m pretty sure my original domain (25 years) lends it’s respectability to new domains I host at the same address. The hell of it is I host on a resi IP address and have never had a single blacklist event. I don’t even know how that’s possible other than the fact that I’ve done it for so long with no incidents that I think I’m on a whitelist or something.
deleted by creator
I selfhost my own mail server (my primary mail in fact).
My LE certs expired on Christmas eve, when I was also getting sick. I didn’t realize my mail server was down for a week until about NYE. Luckily Postfix queued all my emails and there was nothing important lost, but I am reevaluating self hosting my mail server. That being said, this was also the worst issue I’ve faced in over a year of self hosting mail. And it only arose because my dumbass still hasn’t automated my certificate rotation.
If you’re using let’s encrypt, it’s worth automating the cert renewals. Even for systems where the automation is difficult and not supported.
It’s also worth running some kind of monitoring system. You can check certificates with OpenSSL really easily. Fire off a message to NTFY.
I have the renewal process itself automated, just not the replacement process.
yup, fairly normal. I had to jump through some hoops for my old haproxies
Same principle as, “A lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client?”
This mentality is backwards. Hosting email has pitfalls yes but in a world where more people do it the less deep those pitfalls will become.
If you are curious and want to host email go for it!
Until you have a bad config as the other commenter pointed out and miss a critical email like an interview or medical item