Self-hosting with Ubuntu Linux: Creating an Email server

Why should you self-host your email service?

A self-hosted email provides you with the following benefits.

You get to store emails on your own server that you have unlimited access to.

The server belongs to you and you can access every email ever sent or received by your system anytime and in any format. Why would you want to do that? It gives you access to every written communication in your company ever. Why is that important?

Legal proof: Because every written communication is saved and ready for you to use, and should a legal issue arise between yourself and any of your vendors / clients, you can use the emails as proof of communication and agreement of contract.

Data mining: Email is just data, and data can be analysed and queried. If every email that your company ever sent or received is stored in your own database, then you can run querying and data mining software through them so that you can find insights about your communication.

E.g. are your emails telling you that you are spending too much time answering basic questions about how to use a tool? Maybe it's time to create a Wiki page instead of using email.

E.g. are most of your emails about pricing and discounts? It's time to create a page comparing your different pricing plans and when clients are eligible for discounts.

Customer relation history: Since all the emails are on your server, you get to keep the entire history of your communication with every client on your server, never fearing the loss of that data. It's always available for you whenever you want.

Now think about it. Does GMail make such things possible? No. They give you a specific quota. Once that quota exceeds GMail starts deleting your oldest mails. And you can never get them. Nor does GMail allow you to query your emails directly in the form of a database.

Need more reasons on why you should self-host? Read on.

Take control of features and get rid of imposed limitations.

Have you tried to send a high-resolution photo through GMail? Well, it probably won't allow you because of the 25 MB limit per email. But, you can use Google Photos, can't you?

Why should I? Email is my choice of communication with whoever I want to send photos to. Why should a Silicon Valley tech company tell me that I shouldn't send large emails and should instead seek a service that allows large photos? Why should I spread my work across multiple services & leave the convenience of my email inbox just because a big tech company says so?

Why can't I send EXE files? Why can't I send ZIP files and instead resort to downloading and using RAR or 7ZIP to compress my files?

Scores of such limitations are imposed by big tech companies who dictate terms on how you should communicate with your own client. They impose restrictions on the size of each email, type of attachments, how many recipients you can send a message to at once, and so on.

As if that's not enough, here's another problem.

Costs increase as more employees join you and as you store more emails.

Most third-party services charge per inbox per month. They charge additionally if you need to expand the size of the inbox in order to accommodate your entire communication history and the inevitable addition in the future.

The more your company grows by number of people, you need to pay more for more inboxes. As you company grows in age, you need more storage to accommodate your entire history of communication.

Your email service bills will increase as your company expands, till one day you notice that it accounts for a large part of your monthly expenses.

With self-hosted email, you use the same server that you use for your other service, such as your company's website. And it doesn't matter if you are a proprieter, have 5 employees, 50, 500 or 5 million. One email server, if well setup, can scale gracefully.

But isn't it expensive and hard to set up an email server?

It's usually the large companies that set up their own emails, while startups don't do so. Just because it is exclusively the large companies that do so doesn't mean that the process requires dedicated personnel, deep pockets or extreme technical expertise.

You don't need to be a Fortune 500 company to have your own email.

In fact, the earlier you start, the better. So that you have complete control over your emails from day 1.

And you do not need a new server machine to host emails. If you are already self-hosting your own website, e-Commerce or SaaS, you can use that very server machine to host your emails.

Learn how to self-host your email

With my course on how to self-host an email server, you can learn how to set up your own and take complete control of emails within 2 and a half hours.

This 150-minute course can set your startup for a scalable solution for communicating with your customers through email, right from the outset. The set-up will take you less than the time it takes for you to watch your favourite Hollywood blockbuster. Even if you have never set up an email service before.

Here's what you will learn.

You will learn how to use Ubuntu Linux to create your own email server, using which you can send and receive emails without having to use third-party solutions like Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo.

The course will walk you through installing the necessary software applications, configuring them securely and accessing them through GUI, so that you have your own safe and secure email service which you can access through an email client or a web browser.

Here are some people who have taken my course and have successfully set up their own email servers.

Glen from California, USA has a ticket booking for movies and theatres, and he has set up his own email server to automate the mailing of tickets and reminders to those who purchase tickets.

Carlos from Brazil set up his email server in a $5 Raspberry Pi to send data from his home automation sensors via email.

Rainer from Berlin, Germany uses a self-hosted email service to send automated daily reports from his Machine Learning powered system.

Sriram from Bengaluru, India set up a self-hosted email service for his 50-person company.

Stephan from London, UK chose to free his company from tech hegemony and set them on the path of self-reliance starting from their email service.

These are just a few examples from hundreds of students who have set up a self-hosted email service for their ventures after taking my course.

Now it's your turn.

You have chosen the difficult path of freedom. Now don't let the tech giants dictate what you can or can't do in your business.

Choose freedom. Choose to self-host.