MasterDestroyer wrote on January 17, 2021 at 12:26 AM

i just set up a mail-in-a-box on a vps. it was surprisingly easy

J0yI9YUX41Wx wrote on January 17, 2021 at 8:30 AM (edited on January 17, 2021 at 8:32 AM)

Not a bad idea!

I'm trying not to come across as a VM salesman and just to be thorough and specific about the information I'm sharing. Here I go. Vultr rents out a VM for $2.50/mo., full specs below. That easily out-competes most of the private email services reviewed, price-wise! You just have to figure out how you're going to do backups.

(Message me for a referral code if any of you are interested so we each each get a couple bucks free credit.)

Specs for the cheapo VM:

10 GB disk space on an SSD
512 MB of RAM
500 GB monthly bandwidth
But... it only does IPv6!
The pre-configured OSes available to choose from includes Ubuntu, and there are numerous "get Mail-in-a-box installed on Ubuntu" guides available online.
Note: The $2.50/mo. IPv6-only box is only available in some Server Locations such as New Jersey, USA. Not sure what the rhyme or reason for that is.

If you can handle the fact that you'll only get an IPv6 address, that box is more than sufficient to serve email. It's $3.50 for the same machine but with IPv4.

MasterDestroyer wrote on January 17, 2021 at 8:54 AM (edited on January 17, 2021 at 8:56 AM)

nice. i like ramnode, it's 3 bucks for a 1-core, 512mb ram, 160~GB hdd, 2TB bandwidth. 5 bucks gets you double those specs

there's some ssd ones too but for a personal email server i figured hdd is probably plenty fast enough

and man mail in a box was easy to set up. too easy tbh, now it's kind of like a black box that i dont' really know how it works. i set up a mail server with dovecot/postfix etc back in like 2012 and it was .. complex

J0yI9YUX41Wx wrote on January 17, 2021 at 9:17 AM

Rad. Lots of affordable VM hosts out there!

Yeah, that there is the timeless conundrum. If you make a complex system easy, you have to make it a black box that you don't actually understand. It's only safe if the black box's engineers did a good job of make sure it's air tight. (The MiiB engineers may well have!) On the other hand, if you let the complex system be complex, you have to do a dang homework assignment to figure out how to do something.

It's nice to see that hosting infrastructure has evolved to the point that VMs are commodified and companies compete and drive prices down and that if you know how to tinker with operating systems you can have quite a powerful machine that you have full control over for, like, dirt cheap.

MasterDestroyer wrote on January 17, 2021 at 11:04 AM

yea, it's super awesome. the mail in a box seems really legit, as far as i've been able to tell. for a personal server it is super adequate.