Once upon a time I said I would never host my own email (or email in general), as it was a pain I didn’t want. Then, I ended up hosting email for mhvlug.org because it turned out to be the simplest solution. A week later I installed postgrey, and watched the spam rates drop by 80%. And it was good.

A couple things changed in the last year. Linode went from UML to Xen, which definitely makes each linode more powerful. My shared hosting company stopped being helpful. I had a couple of small outages. They had moved from a knowledgable support staff, to a support pool that was clueless, and never seemed to understand the ways in which their system was broken. And, after hosting mhvlug email for a while with no issues, it seemed reasonable that dague.net email would be safe there as well.

Backups (thanks to backuppc) have been ramped up from every 24 hrs to every 6 hrs on the box, to narrow my window in which I can screw things up. Only one set of email delays so far, mostly because I set a wrong postfix param over the weekend, which may have been blocking mhvlug.org email as well. But that is resolved now. Dan will at least thing I’m a real man now. 😉