@mischievoustomato >it's a pita I've heard
It isn't if you already host a server on an unrestricted connection.

Proprietary distros like Debian even have the mailsever package configured to work out of the box.

There is also proprietary "mail in a box" VM images.

Of course you would manually install a mailsever in a free distro wouldn't you?


You need to set a few DNS records as well, but that's easy.

The main issue is setting rDNS to match the sending domain (not strictly necessary, but most mailservers do regard rDNS as confirmation that mail isn't spam) and then DKIM (not really necessary, but if you can do this, you should).

Even after all that, gmail and outlook might block your mail server that is clearly not sending spam, but that's only a feature if that happens.

You will of course receive lots of spam from gmail and outlook, plus a lesser amount of spam from elsewhere (most of it seems to be non-standards compliant sending scripts, which can be blocked by configuring exim to terminate incorrect SMTP sessions).