Self-Hosting Email

One day you get this idea to setup and run your own email server. You decide to do it on OpenBSD and why not, you don’t know it either. With all of these unknowns stacking up, it becomes quite obvious you’re going to need lots of patience and good documentation. Before I share my experience, I just want to say that this isn’t really a how-to just some tips on what I did to set it up.

What I used

• Domain Name - NameCheap
• Cloud Host - Vultr
• OpenBSD - OpenBSD
• An OpenBSD E-Mail Server Using OpenSMTPD, Dovecot, Rspamd, and RainLoop - Vultr Docs

Tips

Before you begin following the guide on Vultr Docs, make sure that you validate on MXToolbox that the IP of your cloud server is free from any blacklists.

Managing DNS records was also an interesting challenge. If you have never worked with DNS entries before they are pretty straightforward, however knowing exactly which ones needed required further investigation. You can use the dig command to lookup the records, it looks like this, dig example.com MX any and that’s it.

When following the linked tutorial on Vultr Docs, make sure to always replace mail.example.com with your server url. I found myself looking over many conf files to make sure I had addressed this.

Do not forget the command doas rcctl restart dovecot after updating your packages IF dovecot receives an update.

One last note, if you do end up using Vultr for hosting, you will need to contact their support team to request that they unblock the smtp port so that you can send mail out.

Best of luck!