Hosting an Email Server in 2026: Breaking the Rules
Most people balk at the idea. Just read countless Reddit posts and comments, Stack Overflow replies; everyone tells you not to do it. But I remember pre-Office 365, and how we used to set up on-premises servers. Local Exchange servers sat in corners running FTP and SMB services for local users to sit in the office and access their files directly. I think the main reason for this was connection speed—not everyone had 'good' broadband—so keeping things local was key to performance.
2026 is a Different Matter
I, for one, have (supposedly) 80/20 at my house and fiber is not yet here. Like a lot of people nowadays, I rely on external email for my personal accounts, but for my work email, why shouldn't I serve it myself? I think there has been some gatekeeping in the past 10 years to get people on the subscription models that earn Google, Microsoft, and Apple a small fortune.
The Cost of "Free"
"But I have free emails," I hear you thinking. Free. Free?
We all know now about LLMs and so-called 'AI', how impressive and conversational they are; almost like they have been trained on an almost infinite number of conversations, both casual and formal—now for a small fee of £5.00 you can have a conversation essentially with someone's email from the pre-2000s if you are specific enough with your prompts!
I'm not a fan of this, even in its anonymised state.
Privacy in the Age of AI
Even this very post is being scraped. I can see in my stats that OpenAI is reading my pages. So getting back to privacy-focused storage, and owning what you create; we are going down the self-hosted email server route.
Technical Requirements
Once in production, I will share a little more on the process. But for starters, you need:
- A business connection with open ports.
- A good IP.
Current Status
For now, this service is just for Rooted Hosting. In time, we may open up to users for alert-based messages, but for now, we are sticking with the internal email service provided in your login.
Thanks again for being a real human being. If you have any hosting needs, drop me an email.
Adam