SELF-HOSTED | Set up and run your own Mailserver with Mailcow | DNS, Security, Installation, Test

[@WokCorner]

25:48 - you just made me flashback to a Better Call Saul scene with that word "truly". "is there no other way, truly?" this sentence lives in my heart rent-free

[@nura943]

Hi Karsten, das ist das genialste Tutorial, dass ich jemals zu dem Thema gesehen habe. Du hast damit meinem Mailserver Projekt krassen Rückenwind gegeben. Tausend Dank dafür. Das ist so kurzweilig und cool gemacht und hat zwischen den Parts, die ich schon kannte, die Brücken gebaut. Genial.

[@ishi92]

thank you! mailcow has made the process so easy that its a no brainer for a tech company to run their own mail server - especially if privacy matters to your organization. now need to look into backups.

[@p4nd4hunters68]

How did you resolve it? I believe Portainer can back up the entire container in some way. Or is there another method?

[@ze3rax]

You are amazing in teaching, period. I've spent numerous hours reading this, reading that, many enthusiasts' websites on "How to", yet none of them were able to share the information the way I find it right - sharing it in such a way in order to teach the other side. Thank you! You did great! My server is running right now and it's receiving all the emails (tested).

[@boss0killer]

This is what a tutorial is supposed to look like! Thank you!

[@mrquicky]

This is not at all what a tutorial should look like. Surely you waste the majority of your life watching hours of video only to grab a nugget of what you actually came for.

[@Star-egy]

you are so great, please come back with more self hosted series we need the great way of explaination, also let me say we miss you :)

[@adamkahava]

Add MX record in your DNS records and set the name of it as your domain name and the value of it as the IP address of your mail server

[@dwrout]

Awesome tutorial, I did this as self-hosted on proxmox vm. I only needed additional port forwarding, edits to my reverse proxy and also my domain name host screen layout looked different to the one used, but it came up as in the tutorial. Scored 10/10 on the email test. Great job on the video.

[@psi4j]

I love the content. I have one bit of unsolicited constructive criticism though, and I only am saying this because I believe you will succeed in this KZbin game: I would back off a bit on the zoom cuts. If you do it too often, it can become distracting. I would use it to add emphasis only on particular points or when the subject is changing or taking a slight detour. Great camera angle and your technique is on point too, just over used. Most important of all, you're a good speaker and the content is top notch. Keep up the good work, my friend! I'm your 777th subscriber!

[@benjaminralston7046]

+1 on backing off on the zoom cuts. I am easily distracted and I could not focus on the tutorial because the view was constantly changing.

[@raven325i]

Seriously good job at explaining the process - although I installed mine on a ubuntu platform, most of it was the same - so thanks for your video tutorial. It helped a lot!

[@carter608]

You are the first channel I have actually been able to find that had any sort of tutorial and I had a easy time understanding how everything works thank you so much

[@PeterBatah]

By far one of the better mail server tutorials that I have had the pleasure of sitting through. Wonderful. Thank you for sharing your time and expertise with us. Much appreciated.

[@Stiffy_the_magnificent]

I just want to say Thank you, this has been the best and most comprehensive tutorial I've found on setting up a home email server.

[@sideshowlol]

Thank you for your excellent tutorial, Mr Opentaq. 🙏😎 Sound quality was plenty good enough and your explanations were very helpful. One thing I ran into after the main installation was done was the need to set up an SMTP relay server for my VPS. I couldn't send any email without doing this. This can now be done in the Mailcow UI. There's a section in the mailcow docs under Postfix and Relayhosts. Apart from this, I had a few other things to sort out. I'm testing mailcow on a 2GB RAM server which meant I had to disable ClamAV to prevent out-of-memory situations. I realise this is not recommended for a production email server but it has seemingly been fine for testing and has allowed me to familiarise myself with the rest of the mailcow services.

[@the_chilli_town]

Hello @sideshowlol , what cloud provider are you using. None of the big one seems to open port 25 for new users

[@sideshowlol]

@@the_chilli_town Have you tried alternatives such as port 587 (SMTP with auth) or port 465 (SMTP over SSL)?

[@pharaohstudiosllc]

Great Tutorial! Time for us to take control of our own data & businesses moving forward..

[@jim7smith]

One of the best tutorials I have seen in years of watching. No extraneous babbling, just the facts. Seriously, this was excellent. My only mild complaint is the background music, especially one part where it had vocals. I am hard of hearing anyway, and have to focus to hear the narration. Thanks so much, and praying for your safety in these troubled times for the Ukraine!

[@rosolovsky]

Nice. How can i use letsencrypt certificate for secure Mailcow server?

[@patrickscheel2033]

As always, a wonderful and inspiring video! Keep it up!

[@opentaq]

Thank you so much!

[@olu_herodotus]

@@opentaq The reverse DNS ss confusing for me. You say that it's the host, not the dns provider. Does that mean if you aren't using a host service that this step isn't needed? In my case, I host my VMs locally and my domain is provided by Cloudflare. I'm jus not sure if the reverse DNS step is only needed if the host is external or in my case where would I go to set it up? Thank you!

[@olu_herodotus]

@@opentaq I could send out emails but when I replied those emails I cant find them in my SoGo inbox. Could you help please?

[@fakorededayo2274]

@@olu_herodotushi.. I wanted to ask you, did this method really work for sending bulk emails out?? Were you able to send bulk emails?

[@olu_herodotus]

@@fakorededayo2274 yes you can send bulk emails out using the SMTP but if your Port 25 is closed you might not be able to recieve emails

[@3rdClaude]

Thanks so much for this video. Every other video I found about a mail server was installing a server that had no GUI. Thisa make it so much easier. Liked & subscribed!

[@Sebinator007]

Das war ein wirklich gut durchdachtes Tutorial, danke!

[@viniciostorres]

Great tutorial! The only problem I faced was the time propagation of DNS updates. Thank you very much for your video.

[@commievoyager]

Awesome video! It's just a great job! I'll try this manual tomorrow. I hope it will work. Thanks for your efforts.

[@akiyai]

Very nice, useful and complete tutorial. Thank you. I will give a trial and install this server. You have convinced me of having my own mail server!

[@Epicvids61]

Amazing content, thank you for the tips! Got a 8.7 on the spam meter, and setup my first mailserver!!

[@JayPatel-wn7hs]

at my server i using ERP for my company they already used port 80 and 443. so now how to install mailcow on same server.

[@danielrdugan]

Great tutorial!! Question tho.. would using a service like no-ip or duckdns work for setting this up in my home lab? I really dislike the idea of having a monthly bill of using a VPS and I find the cost of using no-ip way more affordable

[@frankuchan3080]

Thank you! I was able to successfully set up my own mailserver!

[@francesco4143]

Hello and thank you very much for the clear and simple guide, but I wanted to ask you if you could also add the guide for port forwarding that needs to be done on your home router (provided that you always need to have a static public address) and if NGINX Proxy is also present Manager what should he manage and how? Sorry for too many questions but I think this part should be explored :-) Thank you very much

[@Dvalin21]

Hello, I was wondering if you could do a updated version of this video? Cloudfare and mailcow has changed a lot. Thanks in advance.

[@James_Alfonso]

This is the first tutorial I was able to fulfill my mail server without a glitch

[@notDacian]

I run mailinabox for years now, and i never had problems!

[@notDacian]

Also it requires much less resources

[@kennethlau8108]

@@notDacian what server provider are u using. As alot of service providers ban the mail ports

[@notDacian]

@@kennethlau8108 In the beginning i used AWS Lightsail, but now i moved my box to Hertzner, they have better deals and overall i feel the performance is better. For Hertzner you have to wait 1 month for your account to be able to open port 25.

[@MichaelSharpTechniSmart]

@@kennethlau8108 You can see he is using Hetzner, but you have to aopply after 3 months to unblock port 25.

[@chimastudios]

@@notDacian if I can use AWS Lightsail I'm good then

[@sirwrad]

the best tutorial to build a mail server that i've seen! thanks a lot!

[@opentaq]

Thank you!

[@FirstnameLastname-we6dh]

For better security don't setup a root password when installing Debian. If you skip this and only setup a user account the root account will be disabled and you'll get root access on the user account when using the sudo automatically. You may also want to enable automatic updates by installing and configuring unattended-upgrades.

[@martingerlach_1990]

You mean PGP instead of a root password and get root access with sudo -aG sudo username?

[@sveps8883]

For even better security use Gentoo, customise the kernel, use open-doas over sudo. Or if you have the knowledge about BSD use a version of FreeBSD or NetBSD, or even OpenBSD if you want maximum security.

[@gf6h75fghfghfghdfh7]

Great video! Very well explained. My only concern is email reachability these days (aka oligopoly). Did you have any big issue?

[@phobes]

I've started using Cloudflare Tunnel for 3 of my domains, and it effectively masks your home IP and does not require a static IP. Would this work for a mailserver as well?

[@Robert08010]

I am wondering if you can offer a suggested price to do this. For example, how much generally would it cost to lease a server with that configuration? How many people can it support (generally) and how much more per additional user if we're assuming say 50 GB per user?

[@donboscow9291]

THE tutorial on this topic! No other tutorial comes close!

[@sparti89]

Nice, and now i have a domain where i can host my own website. Looking forward for more videos to recycle domains :)

[@decemberfrostpaindine7987]

I am confused at 8:27 part, is it ssh from my VM to my PC? or from my PC to its VM? I am just confused what machine we are referring to. sorry for being newb

[@geoffgates8264]

proper tutorial and no stupid loud music. cheers, by the way I did it and it works.

[@maxmuster6691]

Great video. Did I miss the part where you routet all of the trafic to the VM? How did you do that?

[@ADHDOCD]

This is a great tutorial. Can you also make a video on domain/email reputation & deliverability?

[@fransvanderwerf7485]

Excellent tutorial from Germany! You've been a great help here :) Many many thanks

[@angeldelvax7219]

Why do you use docker? Does mailcow have a relay built in? How do you do the reversed DNS part on a local physical machine in stead of a VPS?

[@invention69]

Hi. Please also specify what is the required speed of internet connection? If running at home with static ip.

[@romainrochas1474]

Mooohooooo it works !!!! Thank you so much ! (I am on this for almost 1 month already...) I still have to fix these anoying email blocking and spam categorization, but I can send and receive mails :)

[@saranyasreedharan480]

I setup the same in ec2 instance and one more local machine. It is working fine. When I am working on the production it is not working ans expected. After adding the DNS. while clicking in the DNS ( to see the record). It is showing 504 gateway time out error. Do have any idea?

[@thomasmullen2511]

The reverse DNS us confusing for me. You say that it's the host, not the dns provider. Does that mean if you aren't using a host service that this step isn't needed? In my case, I host my VMs through proxmox and my domain is provided by Cloudflare. I'm jus not sure if the reverse DNS step is only needed if the host is external or in my case where woukd I go to set it up? Thank you!

[@olu_herodotus]

@opentaq I was asking this same question too!

[@ayhangunay1178]

Hi, super Anleitung. Was aber interessant wäre - Mailcow in Verbindung mit Proxy wie z.B.: Proxmox Mail Gateway nutzen oder Mailcow selbst mit MTA-STS benutzen, was wäre sinnvoller ?

[@dallascao]

Thank you! By the way if you get a "unbound test fail" error, replace the unbound image with unbound-mailcow: image: mvance/unbound:latest

[@AlexS-so7wk]

You are a marvellous person, thank you for the video. I understand almost everything that you said, and it was quite useful for me. A few times I skiped a content, and got lot of waste of time then, so It was a little funny to find solution of my problem in a passage of the video that I skiped :)

[@yoyo26-34]

not working for me. When sending a mail, I got "orange screen with ERROR" but no error description... When login the admin panel, I checked all logs but no error reported in postfix or any other section. So mail is not sent and I have not idea why... However thks for this very clean and detailed video

[@CodinTest]

salam alaikoum, Thank you for this wonderful tutorial, I hope doing well, I just have question after searching for what reason allowing the port 4190 (ManageSieve Protocol).

[@YeloPartyHat]

How do you check DMARC-reports and how should you action and maintain your abuse email?

[@JuanFernandoGallegoGomez]

The hardest part is migrating from a previous mail system preserving all previous data for all accounts, specially if it is a lot.

[@connor7439]

Not really. IMAP sync.

[@nilpo]

​@@connor7439yep. This.

[@megyptmEgy]

awesome :-) really i like your tutorial, one question please if i already have VPS with php, mysql, apache server if i install docker nothing will fail my current work is that right ??? as i didn't use docker before thats why i ask this question. Looking for help :-)

[@mainegrower]

I have a setup with virtual hosts but with a dedicated IP address for this. How do I go about setting this up on an existing server I'm running with virtualhosts and apache2

[@northblue8216]

Very nice. Thank you. What about spam? How do you block spam?

[@vmerinom]

Thanks for this great explanation and the video! Regards from Chile

[@gopireddy5131]

Excellent tutorial; saved me a ton of time! Got this running and created a few mail boxes with a password that the users should change on first login. What config changes do I make to require users to change their passwords on first login? Appreciate any help. I didn't see any UI elements on the webmail client to change the password.

[@bryteogba4708]

How can we route our mails through socks 5 proxy masking our real ip to avoid rate limits

[@brandonmoore3124]

I followed the tutorial to build the mailserver, it's working properly but i can't connect through smtp with a mail client, please what could be the issue.

[@cryptoharvester]

@Opentaq Great video I tried everything step by step like in video and even downloaded your exact version and I get stuck at the docker part. Perhaps can you do a new video with the new Debian possibly. I tried it on the newer and was able to do everything but were it gets lost on that something to to do with the sql database. Im always up for a challege and boy this is one lol.

[@kerimhasanyildirim]

Can I use mailcow as a smtp server such as connecting it from a programming language with smtp over through port 25 or 587?

[@maxime_vhw]

Wait i'm confused about the reverse dns. You do this in the hoster? But im selfhosting on my homelab. I just have a domain, and my own server.

[@essanhaji]

Hi there thank you. I followed along everything is working fine except for ma domain it is not secured no https.please help

[@Sabs761010]

Hi, do you have a video to create a mailserver in linux using postfix and samba or ldap to autentificate users?

[@GrundGad]

Followed the same steps as you did but getting 5/10 for the mail-tester. My lowest scores are in the dmarc and dkim, any suggestions ?

[@reformatioinpeius2743]

Help! I can send emails but can't recieve them. Anybody have any idea of why it may be?

[@PatGreen-t4g]

Do you know of any information on how to migrate my email domains away from Exchange 2007 to mailcow. I have mailcow set up per this tutorial but having trouble getting the correct mail server to show in the mailcow dns recoreds. It keeps wanting to show the exchange server even after all the dns records are set and the mailcow server is set with a lower priority level than the exchange priority. Any hints or references are appreciated.

[@CrynogarTM]

Running Mailcow on homelab🤓 and use VPS as a Reverse-Proxy. Full control over Storage on your local server without paying extra for Cloud Storage which is also not under your control! It's like a Portforwarding from your Local Server to the VPS that expose anything of your Mailserver for you. You just manage the tunnel and mailserver on-Premise without anything extra in the Cloud! If something is suspicious you just need to cut off the Tunnel to your VPS and anything is safe again.

[@ChatGTA345]

This is the way!

[@AquaBliss_gr]

looks great! how can we add virus protection etc? what are the possibilities of hacking? and how? Thank you.

[@yourlinuxguy]

Why didn't you used port 587? Like these ports are supposed to used for SMPT delivery rather than port 25 which is SMPT relay and is blocked by most ISP and Cloud Providers.

[@guandulin]

Great tutorial, I got issues with mailcow's web GUIs (admin andwebmail) with port 80 and 443 since I already had a web server running, just change them on mialcow's configuration and now its fine. Also got problems sending emails since my server is hosted by vultr and by default they block the SMTP ports (solved by opening a ticket explaining I will not be a spammer).

[@nephygt.h.k1187]

Can I be able to connect remotely to this mailserver with smtp credentials?

[@markanthonypadin608]

I am stuck at "Reverse DNS", I want to know where to find this Hoster?

[@gomo5628]

thanks for the detailed vid man. I wonder how this works if i host multi websites/domains on the same server.

[@DNAblue2112]

I managed to get everything but the DNS setup by myself. But this tutorial is awesome and I wish I had used it for the whole setup. Regardless, thanks for the help with the DNS portion!

[@RavivarmanJ]

i can't able to send the mails. the mail test itself failed. i had deployed the configuration settings on gcp virtual machine

[@olu_herodotus]

worked but cant recieve emails evne though I could send out. Please help

[@zekarov]

A fantastic tutorial! Thank you

[@jmsvigno]

One question, how to setup using reverse proxy, like nginx proxy manager behind nat on private ip , with redirect ports from video?!

[@TutoDS2014]

Is possible to add multiple domains to mailcow?

[@ErikDuits-jy4ms]

Thanks for this video! Maybe a stupid question. If i need to restart the server, should i first close Docker / Mailcow? or can i just sudo reboot?

[@prachisinha7634]

What did you find?

[@smalltimer4370]

Would love a tutorial on how to use and configure wildcard SSL on mailcow and mail domains

[@erbmur]

This is incredible! I am now able to send emails through my own domain, but I don't seem to be able to recieve anything. Any pointers as to what I might be doing wrong or missing?

[@zk321]

inapparopiate picture

[@erbmur]

grow up@@zk321

[@fabienl.7569]

I have a stupid question here. Is it possible to do this and provide email hosting services? Clients will provide their domain names and we create professional emails for them? thank you

[@michaelcooper5490]

May I ask how get around the residential block the ISP has on port 25 and 110?

[@HiltonT69]

Check with your ISP. Or use something like Cloudflare Tunnels.

[@NunoRibeiro1975]

Can I built it inside a LXC instead of a VM?

[@_Duke0]

Wow this is amazing!! Can this work as smtp? Can I purchase vps from any platform I wish?

[@laggggggggg3]

Do you need port 25 unblocked? or can I assign another port for this to work? I cant get in or out bound emails. I also was not able to do the RDNS

[@felitendo]

You can assign another Port like 26

[@ghazixdii]

CAN I USE THE EMAIL ACCOUNTS FOR SENDING COLD EMAILS?

[@randomlettersqzkebkw]

Mailcow has huge requirements 8gbs ram O_o are there any other better than this that is as good as mailcow?

[@sideshowlol]

After turning off ClamAV, I have mailcow running in a 2GB RAM VPS for testing. I think 4GB should be fine with ClamAV but it will depend on your requirements. 😎

[@denystry]

Hi i got an error: dovecot-mailcow Cannot start service dovecot-mailcow: failed to create shim task: OCI runtime create failed: runc create failed: unable to start container process: error during container init: error setting rlimits for ready process: error setting rlimit type 6: operation not permitted: unknown

[@MehrTV.]

everything i did like you, and my score was 10/10. but my email went to spam !!!! what is the problem ? ith another toturial also i did, iredmail., and the same thing happend!! also you didnt said how to install ssl certificate on server, when i brows my server hostnaime, it says this site is not secure

[@u-save5989]

You're a very good teacher!

[@MichaelSharpTechniSmart]

I liked, subscribed and HIT the notification bell! Can you go a bit deeper on the rest of the DNS settings? btw, I like the female vocalist's voice in your background music. What is it?

[@gustavomejia9184]

Can I use my websites domain or would I have to buy another one for this?

[@Ruoall]

Where the hell do you get a $5 server with 2 CPUs and 4GB or Ram?

[@opentaq]

Hetzner

[@opentaq]

At least last year, that was still an option.

[@ancour]

Hi give you better then hetzner, there server always get blast and data get erased

[@MattDeezly]

It takes about ~5 seconds for an email to send... is this normal? did I configure something wrong or is there something I can fix? I gave it 5 cores and 12GB of ram...

[@felitendo]

It's normal

[@veroxsity2336]

Is this possible to do on a preinstalled version of debian?

[@alexandermendez9013]

So this has to be done on a VPS? You can’t host it on a local machine?

[@opentaq]

Reason is the DNS stuff. It is not an issue to have something via CloudFlare point to your local environment, but if you don‘t want to have everything in the junk on the recipients side, you will need to have a Reverse-DNS-entry, which typically is not supported with dynamic IP-addresses or non-business-accounts.

[@CRK1918]

My email server is fine at home. Is that you need two IP addresses, one that you yourself and one that can be used for a dedicated email server. Under normal circumstances you do not have security measures in place, you should not expose your home IP address, DDoS etc. Plus you, you have to update your dynamic address frequently. Using some scripts and so on. You can still do it, but rDNS is still a problem, some Email Providers email may classify your email as spam. I'm sure it's okay to receive email for you, When send email out, there are some providers that may not like it if no rDNS. But depending on your main purpose, if it's a personal hobby, you're sure it's okay.