Building my own email server

I have owned the domain tste.dev for years now, and I’ve always considered hosting my own email server. It is no trivial task, but it means having better control of how my own data is stored and handled, especially considering how much sensitive information is unfortunately transmitted via email.

Understanding email

When you compose and send an email, your client hands the message off to a Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) using the SMTP protocol (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol). The MTA then looks up the recipient’s domain via DNS MX records to determine which mail server should receive the message.