One thing you should consider about running a "family" mail server (or any other IT services for friends and family): that you have a clearly documented path of management succession. A dear friend of mine passed away last year and was running just such an email server. Nobody really knew how to get into it for maintenance, and a couple weeks after he passed. it crashed, and none of us knew precisely where it was physically located (on the end of a VPN tunnel, it tuns out). This took down email for 100 of his closest friends and family members for several weeks. We couldn't even unlock the domain,

I've been using Linode, also; works fine on the Linode end, but I still
see occasional rejections based on my Linode IP address (most recently
from outlook.com). It's nothing my specific IP is doing, but appears to
be blacklisting of an address range. And gmail randomly puts some
outgoing mail into recipients' spam folders. Trying to get an address
unblocked by a major provider works almost as well as howling into the wind.

Maybe I'm being stubborn to insist on continuing to run what's basically
a family mail server, but it does seem like there's a matter of
principle there: it should be possible to have an email account without
having all the emails stored by a third party. If the answer ends up
being, "Oh, just use gmail, everybody else does!" ... well, so be it, I
guess, but we should be clear that something got lost in that transition.

Jim Shankland

On 9/26/23 9:10 AM, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
> I've run a mail server on Linode for 6 or 7 years now; no technical problems.
>
> End-node, Zimbra, postfix.
>
> Cheers,
> -- jra
>
> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Jonathan Leist via NANOG" <nanog@nanog.org>
>> To: "Daniel Corbe" <daniel@corbe.net>
>> Cc: nanog@nanog.org
>> Sent: Tuesday, September 26, 2023 10:32:51 AM
>> Subject: Re: SMTP-friendly VPS provider where I can also get a BGP feed
>> Pretty much every popular provider blocks port 25 out by default, and
>> they'll instead try to steer customers to use a smart host. However, some,
>> including Linode, will unblock port 25 by request:
>> https://www.linode.com/docs/guides/running-a-mail-server/#sending-email-on-linode
>>
>> On Tue, Sep 26, 2023 at 6:11 AM Daniel Corbe <daniel@corbe.net> wrote:
>>
>>> Hey all,
>>>
>>> I apologize if this isn't the right place to post this; however, I
>>> thought maybe the NANOG community would be able to point me in the right
>>> direction.
>>>
>>> I'm looking for a place that I can host a mailer. My primary use case
>>> is a Mailman-style technical discussion list; much like NANOG but
>>> software related instead of network related: READ: non-commercial in
>>> nature.
>>>
>>> I'm currently a vultr customer, but they're refusing to unblock port 25
>>> on my account. I've tried explaining my use case but no matter who I
>>> talk to over there they just keep pointing me to their spam policy.
>>>
>>> Thanks!
>>> -Daniel
>>>
>>
>> --
>> Jonathan Leist
>> Staff Engineer