Somone on Slashdot asked what are possible “Self-Hosted Gmail Alternatives?“.

Unfortunately, it seems like in practice there are none. When I registered my domain, I used to run an e-mail server too, but eventually I had to turn it off. The main problem was, of course, spam. Lots of it. Then the outages. Whenever my server was down, I would not be able to get any e-mails. Then other servers started to blacklist me, because I was running off a residential IP. I was getting auto-responses politely advising me to use my ISP’s mail server. Finally, due to the spam pressure, the ISP closed port 25 for all communications except to their own SMTP server.

Thanks to human greed and ignorance that breed spam, something that used to be an open communication network of e-mail servers is now reduced to an elite club where only the big players can survive, and there is not solution in sight. Sigh.

Generally, these days I would think twice before hosting any kind of server at home. By doing so, you expose yourself to security risks, reliability issues (do you have a UPS? do you have reliable backup?), and other interesting things.

Having said that, I must confess I still run my web server from home: not on my main work PC, of course. I do have a backup, but I don’t have UPS. I don’t consider my web site mission critical 🙂