If you’re a privacy lover looking for a good alternative to popular webmail providers like gmail, outlook, and yahoo, you’re in luck. you can learn how to set up your own email server and escape the routine email scanning these providers perform on millions of users, and enjoy a secure and private environment for your emails.
Personal or private email servers live in their own space, unlike the usual apple, google and microsoft server farms. this way you can set up your own drive and fully control how your emails are accessed, managed and stored.
For small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) looking to cut costs, postage management can seem expensive. Similarly, the operation of their mail servers seems difficult due to the incessant sending of spam. They probably also don’t have the internal technical staff or tools to properly set up and run one, while managing threats.
This is why many SMEs outsource to third-party providers. however, this comes with hidden risks such as loss of control over your mail security, privacy intrusion and confidentiality risks, delivery issues from sharing a server, and more.
Fortunately, you can run a secure mail server and spam filter for your personal or small business use. In this guide, we’ll walk you through how to create and configure your own email server right on your PC.
what you’ll need to set up a personal email server
- a separate computer with sufficient hard drive capacity, which will act as the email server.
- domain name for the email server that you will use to set up email addresses. </li
- high-speed, reliable internet connection.
- an operating system such as windows or linux to run the server.
- software programs such as mailenable that can classify and routing emails, antivirus protection and spam filter such as spamassassin (the software you will use depends on the operating system you use).
- a system to streamline the configuration process.
how to configure the email server
The easiest shortcut to setting up your email server is to hire someone from you to do it for you. once the initial setup is done, you can change the preferences to your liking.
If you can’t afford to pay someone to do it for you, it’s still possible to set it up yourself.
For the purposes of this guide, we will walk you through a tutorial on setting up your windows operating system based email server. we will use hmailserver, a free and flexible email server for windows that allows you to handle all your emails without relying on your isp to handle them for you.
is one of the most popular email servers for windows that is easy to use and install and offers basic features like security and built-in spam protection from spamassassin.
Follow the steps below to complete the setup.
- download and run the hmailserver installer.
- click next and accept the license terms.
- Select server on the next screen if you want your local computer to act as a server, or administrative tools to manage the server remotely.
- Next, select the database to use. built-in database is checked by default and is great to use if you want something quick and simple.
- click next and choose the folder location where the program shortcuts will be saved.
- specify the main password that you will use to manage your hmailserver installation (write it down somewhere as you will need to use it frequently).
- click next and then click install to add hmailserver to your computer.
- when finished, make sure the run hmailserver manager box is checked and click at finish.
- hmailserver administration window will open. click connect.
- Enter the password you created during installation.
- You are now ready to set up your smtp server. in the new window, click on add domain.
- In the general tab, type your domain name and click save.
- In the left pane, click domains>accounts.
- click add and type a name in the address field, a password and then click save.
- go to settings>protocols and choose smtp (uncheck the pop and imap boxes).
- click advanced and type localhost for default domain. click save.
- click the + next to advanced to expand the list, and then click auto-ban. This feature blocks IP addresses after several failed login attempts.
- uncheck the enabled box and click save.
- click ip ranges and click tcp/ip ports to see the ports configured for smtp, imap and pop as 25 and 110 for smtp and pop, and 143 for imap. opening these ports ensures that the mail server can receive and send mail.
- enable different options like forwarding, autoresponder, dns blacklists and others in hmailserver.
- finally click + next to utilities to expand the list and click diagnostics to test your settings.
- Under select (the domain you want to test on), type the domain you entered earlier, and click start.
your hmail server is configured with basic options.
- check collect server details to see your hmail server version and database type.
- try outgoing port: an error here it means that your smtp server will not be able to communicate, in which case some troubleshooting is needed.
Congratulations, you have just set up your own email server.
To read or write your emails, get a webmail client like outlook or thunderbird. if you want to use a computer application instead, enter your email address as your username and the authentication type is password.
While hosting your own email server requires a bit of effort and caution on your part, it’s worth having if you don’t want the hassles and insecurities of popular webmail providers.
remember to keep your server ip and domain in check, always watching for any issues like public blacklisting, as some providers may do this for incoming emails, due to a configuration wrong dns.