Trustworthy Systems

Running your own mailserver

Authors

Peter Chubb

    School of Computer Science and Engineering
    UNSW,
    Sydney 2052, Australia

Abstract

Email is a basic service we all tend to take for granted. Many big companies provide email as a service, for free, to customers ,and to the general public. Why do they do this?

Personally I'd rather not depend on the (dubious) generosity of Google, Microsoft, Apple, or the like; I'd rather have email that's under my control as far as possible. I can't control what they do with email sent from or to such domains; but I _can_ control where my email is stored, who can access it, and where and when it is sent.

So what does it take to run a mailserver? I'll go into the detail of my own setup (which involves working around my ISP's firewall), explaining the difficulties I keep running into to ensure that email keeps getting to its destination, and that my own family isn't drowned in spam.

BibTeX Entry

  @inproceedings{Chubb_24,
    address          = {Gladstone, QLD, AU},
    author           = {Peter Chubb},
    booktitle        = {Everything Open},
    month            = apr,
    title            = {Running your own Mailserver},
    year             = {2024}
  }

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