I wanted to buy a Raspberry Pi and host all of these services, but then someone told me emails run into spam filter issues and VPNs have some sort of vaguely-defined problem.
Email hosting should not be a self-hosted thing. Most residential IPs are already in a blacklisted block. Additionally, since you’re probably not an email server admin, you will get hacked. Your server will be used to spam me, and I don’t want that.
Check the TOS of your ISP to see if they allow the other services you want on their network. Then, just get a $5 droplet from DO.
Email is the area that I had the most stressful times. I hosted my email for years until recently, because big corps have been taking over the email server space and they keep putting more and more restrictions on which emails can get to their customers.
I self host email and have for years. Once you learn all the dozens of things you need to get working together it works fine, though I too have been categorized as spam before. It’s good to do if you want to learn a lot and make a hobby of it. Heck you can even so really fun things like build auto filters based on sentiment analysis and bounce the email saying to try again but nicer ( this was a prototype for a fb friend who wondered if of was doable).
Not recommended if you don’t want to make a hobby of it though.
As for vpn, everyone should have a VPN server running at home so you can road warrior through t while traveling or at a coffee shop. Super useful. Work will never know what I’m doing on my phone via their WiFi. Muahaha. Usually it’s checking in on the self-hosted home automation system.
You should self-host VPN because it’s too good to not to do that. You basically (can) route your traffic through your VPN and all the data is encrypted. That’s the first plus.
Second - I use self-hosted VPN to RDP to my system so I can use my 80GB IDE, 8 Core CPU or use Virtualized Linux wherever I am from whatever device I wish (that is my VPN client).
Third - you can setup a separate VPN network to play old games (like HoMM, Worms, Liero, etc.) with friends over the Internet without problems, lags etc. that services like Hamachi / Comodo “provide”. VPN is your LAN over the Internet. It (logically) works that way. You have the game that works only over LAN. VPN is your solution.
Fourth - there are times when you want to have your very specific IP to do something or you just need to change it because something doesn’t work.
Problems that VPN has? Well. I don’t know any. It’s all based on your configuration. You literally configure your problems. If you change networks during connection and it stopped working, it’s because you configured it that way. It’s not the problem with VPN. It’s the problem with your configuration.
Email is hard, but if you want to self host, I really having a look at this:
https://gitlab.com/simple-nixos-mailserver/nixos-mailserver
I’m using it at soyoustart and while I don’t do much with it, so far it’s been a year and a half without (major) issues.
It puts a lot of the building blocks together in a single service.
I don’t know how feasible it is to install nixos on a raspberry pi, though but you can use it as a checklist of stuff you need to do.
Followup question: for a vpn self hosted, do i need a public static ipv4 address? Because I do not see how I’d connect to the server otherwise
I wouldn’t self host email. If you want to have your own email use a VPS. I set up my own email a couple months ago and learned a lot.
I’d always suggest at least having a backup email account that you don’t self-host. Since I rent a server from KimSufi, I registered with a non-self-hosted email account to avoid awkward issues where they send me an email to let me know that my infrastructure has gone down…
Nah not really. You can use a dynamic DNS. Cloudflare is my DNS authority for my domain and I have a script that runs on my server that automatically updates my “home.mydomain.net” to point to my public ip if it changes.
Then my VPN client connects to the domain and doesn’t need to know that the IP changes.