A detailed walkthrough of building a self-hosted email stack from scratch, including obtaining a dedicated RIPE-allocated /24 IPv4 block for clean IP reputation. Covers the full pipeline: spam filtering with Postfix postscreen, greylisting and rspamd, ClamAV virus scanning, Bayesian classification, Maildir storage with Dovecot and Flatcurve full-text indexing, Sieve server-side filtering, and outbound deliverability via SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and SRS. Also discusses IMAP access via Dovecot, Roundcube webmail behind Caddy, and future plans for MTA-STS, DANE/DNSSEC, and a JMAP proxy in OCaml. Reflects on the complexity of modern email self-hosting and the shifting security threat model from AI-accelerated exploit chains.
Table of contents
1 Why run your own email?2 Email receipt3 Sending email to other people4 Accessing email for users5 What else is left to do?6 Is this a negative result for self-hosting?103 Impressions