I would appreciate if you leave a comment here telling others if your mail server is running. Perhaps even a word about the purpose of the mail server and the number of users you have. That allows others to see that their time is well-spent and indeed leads to a working mail server. Thanks for your feedback.
I am proud to be able to thank the author of this series of Guides publicly, for all the unbelievable work he has done, all these years. To anyone wishing to truly understand what running a mail server is about, this is the proper place to be.
Seen this guide a few times before and found it to be the most comprehensive one available.
Thanks again for such a comprehensive guide. I’ve been using it for several years and I appreciate the updates for the new versions.
I just did a “speed run” on a test mail server/domain and it took about 2 hours. TLS/DKIM/SPF are all passing too! I’ve gotten a lot of practice with your guide over the last few versions, so I would hope that I can complete it quickly.
Successfully migrated to a Debian 12 server from Debian 9 (2017, yikes).
Thank you for the updated guide!
The only hiccup I encountered was with the new journalctl instead of log files, and also I had to manually add the “quota” column to the “users” database table. This was easier than modifying some of the configuration given in the guide. My server is just for myself so I skipped the quota section.
After getting my server up I struggled like hell with the Z-Sync 2.7.1 tarball (no packages for Debian 12 available) but I got everything working. My new VPS is only 2GB ram rather than 4GB ram (no more clamd, no more fail2ban). Finally decommissioning my old VPS!
Successfully upgraded mailserver using the Ansible Playbook route on my Raspberry Pi 2. Many thanks.
Thanks Christoph, For your work running this site and the ISPmail guides. I’ve been following them for each Debian release since Wheezy.
I use my mail server primarily for my personal email address and also have a handful of friends using it. Works great.
I have been using this guide for 10 years now with great success. I truly appreciate how you explain each step you do. This makes it very easy to follow, and also easy to deviate from the guide if desired. Thanks a lot.
So very happy to have this guide. My mailserver is up and successfully sending/receiving mail. I feel so free knowing that I am in charge of my email. I am one step closer to escaping from the big companies that control my data. Thank you.
I used this guide already with my first mail servers I set up 15 years ago (round about, I’m not quite sure).
It always worked fine and is a very big help!
I have Debian servers with 5 – 30 users only, including one community project where also newsletters (i.e. many mails) are sent.
Today I set up my newest mail server and all works fine.
I want to thank Christoph for his great work and support and hope the guide will never end 🙂
Thank you very much,
Nicole Cochems
Thank you Christopher for this guide that I have been using since Wheezy or Jessie!
I manage around fifteen emails and numerous SYMPA lists (sympa.org).
The migrations have always gone well.
Since Buster, I use the Ansible playbook which is very practical.
I’ve been using this guide for over a decade. While I mostly moved the setup with time from server to server and came back here for tips when something broke, I wanted to do something different this time.
I’ve recently rented a bigger server and didn’t want to create VMs with one dedicated to the mail server. Instead, I wanted to dockerise everything. So I came back here for this trusty guide and created dockers from each component using tons of hints from here. What I love about this guide is that it doesn’t only list file configs needed, but also why. So I can better understand how changes in my setup might require slight differences from your instructions.
All in all, I’m very happy with the results, all my mail migrated successfully, Thunderbird doesn’t have a clue that anything changed, and everything is as good as it always was. So thanks a lot for the hard work you put into this guide and the continuous updates to it, especially the auth with mysql and the rspamd/dkim stuff as they’re not straightforward to understand without actual examples.
Thank you Christopher
I’ve just setup my mail server and i’m very happy with it. I’ve learned a lot
A great tutorial, many thanks Christopher. Being a network bod, with only desktop Linux experience I was able to follow the tutorial and yesterday my mail server went live. I’ve learned quite a bit about troubleshooting in Linux along the way.
A friend who has been using an ISPmail server for many years recommended your site. I’m very glad he did, and I’d certainly pass on the recommendation.
Finally got my mail server up today. I had so much fun following this guide. I stubbornly wanted to host this on my own hardware despite a blocked port 25 and a dynamic IP. I rented a cloud VPS to get around those roadblocks and forwarded all the traffic to my home network over a VPN. What ensued was an absolute nightmare of iptables/ip route/ip rules which I guess I enjoyed masochistically. In the process I have learned so much about Linux, email, and the internet in general. Would I ever use this VPN approach for any type of business or serious use? Hell no. But for a personal email account and a learning project it’s been great.
One improvement I am looking into is push notifications for iPhone. Best I can currently do is fetching email every 15 minutes. But I have found a dovecot plugin for actual instant push notifications which I intend to try: github.com/freswa/dovecot-xaps-plugin
The other thing I am trying to figure out is hosting a website on the same server, i.e. a website on example.org and roundcube on mail.example.org . Not sure if my issue is with TLS certs or I just need to do some Apache config.