Self-hosted mail server and control version instance

Technology Software
1

Hi,
I am looking for use cases of organisations that host their own mail server.

I am collaborating with an organisation of ~30 members. The mail plans that hosting providers offer are just enough for them for now (50GB, although they offer extra storage if needed) and they would like to explore the option of hosting their own mail server on their VPS. Cost can be a reason for moving to a self-hosted option, but what they save in hosting costs can be less than what they need to spend in technical work for setting it up and maintaining it.
This organisation works with marginalised communities, but data privacy is just a medium concern for them, specially when emails are sent to and from mail servers that are oriented to privacy in different levels.
The information I could gather from the people around me is that it is difficult to set it up in a way that the messages sent from it are not detected as spam by other mail servers. I haven’t found many resources about self-hosting mail servers at a professional level and I would appreciate if someone can refer me to information about when it makes sense to go for the self-hosted option and how to set it up properly for making it reliable.

In addition to this, they would also like to explore the option of hosting their own control version instance. They have 4-5 repositories that they want to publish in order to make the projects collaborative, so having their own instance can hinder the visibility of the project and may not be the right solution for such a small number of repositories.

Any thoughts and experiences are welcome. Thanks!

2

I’d suggest using Mailcow for email:

Webarchitects hosts several Mailcow servers for clients, it needs at least 6GB of RAM in my experience, we have hosted it on VPSs with 3GB but it ends up swapping all the time.

Given the number of SCM repos you have Gitea probably makes sense:

Rather than GitLab CE as it is quite resource hungry, but personally I like GitLab, we have an instance at git.coop for Webarchitects Co-operative members:

3

99% of the time, it doesn’t! If I was making this decision, I’d need to have overwhelming requirements for control over our data to sway the decision. So overwhelming that there are no providers that will enter into a sufficient SLA with us to cover what we want.

If the organisation doesn’t already have the experience to make this call, then they’ll end up spending more on consulting fees for someone to maintain their new mail service over time than they’ll save. All this on top of battling against spam filters.

That said, there are plenty of other options depending on what they need email for. For example, if they just want some arbitrary email addresses that forward to a group of people, they could use Cloudflare Email Routing for free.

( Also hi Pau! :wave: )