My VPS Server

Why Not Running An Email Server At Home?#

A very important aspect for running your own email server is, that your server needs to be able to be identified via Reverse DNS Lookup (rDNS). Mail servers receiving mails from your server trying to identify spam emails with mutiple criteria. One of it is, that the sending servers URL must fit the senders IP. With rDNS the receiving server asks for the URL of the server. If this URL does not fit the senders IP, then emails reveived from there are likely to be classified as spam. rDNS entries are usually only possible if you run zour server at a VPS provider.

Another reason is, that an email server usually should be reachable at any time. Having a server at home does not necessarily fulfill this requirement.

Selection of the VPS Provider#

As I wanted to run mailcow for providing the email service, there are several requirements given for what the server ressources should be at a minimum:

• CPU: 1 GHz
• RAM: minimum 6 GiB + 1 GiB swap
• Disk: 20 GiB (without emails)
• Architecture: x86_64 or ARM64

Here the minimum RAM requirement is really what makes a selection not so easy, also because of the recurring cost involved.

Another requirement is, that the provider shall allow sending mails by default or at least after request.

And of course, the server shall be located in Europe.

This criteria led me to contabo where I selected their VPS 10 product:

• CPU: 4 core
• RAM: 8 GB
• Disk: 150 GB SSG (or 75 GB NVMe)
• Ethernet: 200 Mbit/s
• OS: Ubuntu
• Auto Backup (+0.75 €7/month, which are well spend)
• 1 dedicated IP

Contabo allows to sent 25 emails per minute which is really enough for my family email server. Advantage of this limitation is also, that servers running at contabo will not be suspicious of being misused by mass email spammers.

Cost per month (12 months contract): 4.35 € + 0.83 € VAT (19%).