August 19 2026

Email is the one piece of infrastructure almost nobody self-hosts anymore, and for good reason. Cloud providers have made it genuinely hostile to outsiders. In this talk, we’ll walk through what it actually takes to run your own mail server from scratch: picking a VPS provider that won’t block you at the network level, navigating the reverse DNS and port 25 approval process, and standing up Postfix, Dovecot, and rspamd to handle delivery, storage, and spam filtering for a real domain.

We’ll cover the parts that trip people up before they ever send their first email:

• SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records
• virtual mailboxes versus system users
• the deliverability reputation game that determines whether Gmail trusts you or buries you in spam

The session walks through a server built ahead of time, a look at SQLite-backed user management without a database server, and where self-hosted mail falls short and where it doesn’t. Attendees will leave with a clear mental model of how modern email authentication fits together, a reproducible setup they can follow at home, and enough hard-won troubleshooting knowledge to avoid the mistakes that get self-hosters blacklisted in week one.