Finally Hosting E-mail On My Cloud
I started out my day hearing the rants of a friend who was just fed up with cloud services treating him poorly. Mixing up account credentials and failing to jump though the proper hoops, you can quickly find yourself at a dead end with no where to go and no one to call.
In my journey to open source all the things & apps that I use daily, one of the last major reliance I have is on mail providers. E-mail continues to be the golden standard among all the notification bubbles around us. It's been long overdue, and partially attributable to the rather burdensome stigma setting up a server can be.
Setting up an open source server on linux, say postfix on Ubuntu can challenge your patience and persistence. Dealing with spam, DNS SPF TXT & MX entries, SSL & webmail takes more than just a few steps. Then you have the mysterious problem that is deliverability, which as led to many startups that are successfully doing nothing but helping you send email.
The problem for users is that cloud email is becoming increasingly frustrating. The number of changes that have been made to webmail apps in the past two years, improving the app is nearly zero. For the most part it seems like the changes are dumbing down to the massive scale of the usage.
Another common use case that I thought would have better accommodations by now is the need for multiple addresses, and multiple domains. It's excruciating trying to manage more than a couple webmail accounts, and becoming worse with the increased pressure to provide a phone number for each account.
I might be special, but can't be the only one with more than one website that they'd like to receive email from. With those influences finally pushing me over the edge, I decided to take the Adam Curry challenge to setup an iRedMail mail server.
I always mean to write badass walk through's to capture all the problems I bump into along the way, trying to be like those awesome pages you find on the internet that answer your exact problem, but I'm writing this after I got things mostly running. To get my feet wet, I used the AWS free EC2 micro instance that I haven't been using. Hopefully if it goes well and gets usage, I'll be upgrading it and growing the user base.
I'll spare the gory detail for today, but suffice to say I'm a little proud that I got it running to solve at least a couple issues today, and can now setup all the accounts and domains that I need in minutes. When I have more time I'll add more details, or just feel free to ask if you have any questions.
Although this took a bit of valuable time out of my day, I think it was well worth it, and honestly a task I've been putting off for far too long.
In my journey to open source all the things & apps that I use daily, one of the last major reliance I have is on mail providers. E-mail continues to be the golden standard among all the notification bubbles around us. It's been long overdue, and partially attributable to the rather burdensome stigma setting up a server can be.
Setting up an open source server on linux, say postfix on Ubuntu can challenge your patience and persistence. Dealing with spam, DNS SPF TXT & MX entries, SSL & webmail takes more than just a few steps. Then you have the mysterious problem that is deliverability, which as led to many startups that are successfully doing nothing but helping you send email.
The problem for users is that cloud email is becoming increasingly frustrating. The number of changes that have been made to webmail apps in the past two years, improving the app is nearly zero. For the most part it seems like the changes are dumbing down to the massive scale of the usage.
Another common use case that I thought would have better accommodations by now is the need for multiple addresses, and multiple domains. It's excruciating trying to manage more than a couple webmail accounts, and becoming worse with the increased pressure to provide a phone number for each account.
I might be special, but can't be the only one with more than one website that they'd like to receive email from. With those influences finally pushing me over the edge, I decided to take the Adam Curry challenge to setup an iRedMail mail server.
I always mean to write badass walk through's to capture all the problems I bump into along the way, trying to be like those awesome pages you find on the internet that answer your exact problem, but I'm writing this after I got things mostly running. To get my feet wet, I used the AWS free EC2 micro instance that I haven't been using. Hopefully if it goes well and gets usage, I'll be upgrading it and growing the user base.
I'll spare the gory detail for today, but suffice to say I'm a little proud that I got it running to solve at least a couple issues today, and can now setup all the accounts and domains that I need in minutes. When I have more time I'll add more details, or just feel free to ask if you have any questions.
Although this took a bit of valuable time out of my day, I think it was well worth it, and honestly a task I've been putting off for far too long.