Full-featured email server running OpenBSD

This blog post is a guide explaining how to setup a full-featured email server on OpenBSD 7.5. It was commissioned by a customer of my consultancy who wanted it to be published on my blog.

Setting up a modern email stack that does not appear as a spam platform to the world can be a daunting task, the guide will cover what you need for a secure, functional and low maintenance email system.

Solene Rapenne

If you ever wanted to set up and run your own email server, this is a great way to do it. Solene, an OpenBSD developer, will help you through setting up IMAP, POP, and Webmail, an SMTP server with server-to-server encryption and hidden personal information, every possible measure to make sure your server is regarded as legitimate, and all the usual firewall and anti-spam stuff you are definitely going to need.

Taking back email from Google - or even Proton, which is now doing both machine learning and Bitcoin, of all things - is probably one of the most daunting tasks for anyone willing to cut ties with as much of big tech as possible. Not only is there the technical barrier, there's also the fact that the major email providers, like Gmail or whatever Microsoft offers these days, are trying their darnest to make self-hosting email as cumbersome as possible by trying to label everything you send as spam or downright malicious.

It's definitely not an easy task, but at least with guides like this there's some set of easy steps to follow to get there.