Adiós self-hosted mail server

As the title suggests, I will be retiring my self-hosted mail server (mx1.staticsafe.ca) soon, most likely by next month.

It has been a lot of fun and an excellent learning experience but I simply cannot devote the time and/or effort into active maintenance of the server.

I am moving all of the mailing lists that I used this server for to the extremely competent folks over at Fastmail.

The retirement will be done in a few stages as follows:

  1. Stage 1 – Personal mailing list subscription move (completed)
  2. Stage 2 – Change of MX, SPF records for staticsafe.ca to Fastmail’s servers and add a wildcard alias there.
  3. Stage 3 – Discontinuation of relay/non-personal services on mx1.staticsafe.ca. One person is using this server as a submission relay for their server. I will be asking them to move to my new MSA only server. Services for caffeine-linux.org will also have to be discontinued.
  4. Stage 4 – Stop all relevant daemons. Postfix, Dovecot, amavisd-new.

My Thanks

A lot of people and/or companies have provided direct and/or indirect support for this learning experience.

  • Linode Library for providing initial inspiration for the current configuration of the server
  • The folks in the Postfix and Dovecot communities. (#postfix, postfix-users, #dovecot, Wietse for the wonderful software)
  • purrdeta for telling me mail servers are a lot of fun

Addendum

I have put my server configuration files on Github if anyone is interested, you can see them here.