What it is
A mail server on your own VPS: addresses like name@your-domain with no monthly fee per mailbox. DKIM, SPF and DMARC are DNS records without which mail lands in spam.
How we use it
We install Postfix and Dovecot or Mailcow in containers, set up the records and check deliverability to Gmail and Outlook. Important mail can be forwarded to Telegram.
Where your own mail helps a business
- Every employee needs a name@your-domain address, and you do not want to pay a service per mailbox.
- Customer emails should not sit with someone else's mail provider.
- Important messages should reach Telegram at once instead of waiting until someone opens the mailbox.
- Mail should keep working when external services are restricted.
How we use it
On the studio's websites server, domain mail runs in a single docker-mailserver container:
- Postfix receives and sends mail, Dovecot provides IMAP access, Rspamd filters spam, and fail2ban stops password guessing.
- Mail can be read in the Roundcube web interface or in any mail client.
- A separate container forwards every new message to a service Telegram chat: subject, sender, text and attachments as files. Spam arrives as a single silent line.
- Nightly mail snapshots, including the mail-signing key, are kept for two weeks.
We set up domain mail under Infrastructure.
Common problems
- The hosting provider blocks outgoing ports. With our provider, receiving works while outgoing messages queue in Postfix and will go out by themselves once a way out opens. The workarounds are a plan change, sending through an external relay over an HTTPS API, or a tunnel to a server abroad. Check the ports before buying a server.
- Messages land in spam. Without DNS records (MX, SPF, DKIM, DMARC and a reverse PTR record for the IP address) mail services do not trust the sender.
- Antivirus eats memory. The ClamAV signature database takes more than a gigabyte out of four, so on a small server it is switched off.
- A lost customer email is worse than spam. Spam is not discarded but moved to the Junk folder: at a small volume sorting it by hand costs less than losing a request. Mail to non-existent addresses is rejected.
When you do not need it
If you have two or three mailboxes and mostly write to customers on large mail services, a hosted domain-mail service is simpler than running your own server. Your own mail pays off when it matters where the messages are stored, or when mail needs to sit next to your other services.