Ask HN: Self hosted email, Cloud storage and dovecot
If I am self hosting my email for friends and family, but have a volume attached where dovecot stores the email, can I dynamically add another volume to the VM and tell dovecot to balance mail storage between 2 directories?
25 comments
[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 51.6 ms ] threadhttps://wiki.archlinux.org/title/LVM#Add_physical_volume_to_...
However note self hosting mail used to be super easy but these days most report you have a real hard time getting people to accept your mail. When your IP has no prior history and small volume you’ll get false flagged as spam a lot. Likely to be your larger challenge.
Kudos for doing this for friends and family.
Your nomenclature ("volume") sounds like you are using some kind of cloud system. Just expand your volume? It's unclear why you are asking for your ask.
There is a different question of whether that provides enough reliability, but that depends on if your cloud provider already offers safety in case of hardware failure for your volumes.
Note that even today, with a single volume, if you lose it, you lose all your email.
Most cloud providers would provide some resiliency for storage volumes though.
I'd certainly would like to start using ZFS at some point, but can't justify the investment.
Mail is the one thing I eventually caved on and offload to Microsoft. It's an uphill battle keeping your mail out of Spam folders. You setup DKIM, SPF, etc. according to the latest spec, and at the end of the day, the MS and Google still drop your mail in spam. They simply don't care.
Second, the forces and money keeping MS above legally bound 99.9% uptime tower in comparison to any one person's own resources. Is your daily driver even operational 99% of the time you use it? We hackers can't help but to tinker, so I suppose not.
MS has teams of engineers paid specifically to keep the thing running and NOT tinker. At only ~$10 / month that's a no brainer.
In the end I moved it all to GSuite for a few bucks a month. It's simply worth it to avoid the issues with sender rep.
Risk of being blocked by big players (gmail/O365) is real but IMHO very low if you follow BCP. The main problem is that big companies make it very hard or impossible to contact them to resolve the issue.
Can confirm, only issue I have is with outlook.com because their MTA-STS validator is… for lack of a better word: wrong.
I decided that replying to mails from outlook.com is not part of my mailserver's offerings and if it's required others channels have to be sought out. I'm not going to violate established standards just so Microsoft can do things their way.
I'm sure most people here know about DMARC but there are still a lot of mail senders which either have no DMARC record, or send some messages in a way that either DKIM or SPF or even both fail, or have a syntax error in SPD/DKIM/DMARC DNS records.
On top of this it is good to ensure that your servers doesn't generate email backsatter when possible. Send rate limits is a simple but rarely enforced by small servers way to limit amount of spam which can be send if user credentials or web-app hosted on the same server are compromised.
If you are trying to solve storage reliability for single mail server then creating a file system level failover would be way to go as mentioned previously (LVM, soft RAID over multiple volumes, etc).
If you are trying to solve mail service reliability/failover then adding second mail server would be helpful. In that case you can use dsync (does master/master sync) to keep emails on both servers in sync.