I've finally got access to static IPv4 and IPv6 addresses at my home network.
Which meant exactly one thing to me. Which was hosting a working email server at home.
I had to make sure port 25 was open for incoming and outgoing connections. For that I called my ISP, and they told me there wasn't any block on port 25.
And after I heard this, I knew I had to start building that server.
So I've built one using Mailcow. I've used my existing web server to build it, and at the beginning it seemed like it was working. I was able to send and receive emails from my Zoho mail account. And at the beginning, everything went great.
And for the first time in my life, I felt the true freedom of online services and thought I was unstoppable with my self-hosted infrastructure!
But there was a problem.
After using my self-hosted server for a week, things started to get weird.
Mails began to delay. Both incoming and outgoing mails were delayed. At first, I thought it was because the server was getting overloaded because CPU and memory usage was at peak levels.
Then approximately 2 days later, my server became unreachable from outside.
At first I thought the problem was on my server. And while troubleshooting it, I found out that my port 25 wasn't accessible.
So like anyone would do, I called up my ISP. Only to hear that my port 25 "seemed" accessible to them. But in reality it wasn't, and not just to big mail providers; it wasn't accessible from any other small mail servers either.
And after doing a quick web search, I found out I'm not the first one to have this problem.
Turns out, my ISP had some monthly limits on port 25 usage, and the only way to remove it was by getting a commercial network. Which costs a kidney a month.
Since I don't have money and oppurtunity to get that commerical network, I've waited until last week (which completes that 1 month period of limit) to try out if that block on port 25 would get removed.
The result was exactly like I expected. It didn't. And it's still blocked out.
The end result
So yeah, in the end, I ended up in the exact same place I was before.
I spend around an entire week trying to setup and fix that mail server and end result is just a huge road block from ISP.
And if you ask me what I'm gonna do now, the answer would be "I don't know". I can't use a mail server like that. And I'm already frustrated enough with that server before and after that ISP block and I don't think I'll try to create one at home from scratch ever again.
But who knows?
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Thank You!
07.02.2025