Best Practices for Running Your Own Email Server

Plesk Premium Email, powered by Kolab lets you become your own mail service provider in a few easy steps. It’s like creating a personal Gmail service, one that you control from top to bottom. Running the mail server allows you to store your own email, access the mail server’s logs, and access the raw email files in a user’s mailbox. 

However, one key concern when running your own mail server is email deliverability. Without being able to effectively reach your customer base, you cannot do business. So, how do you ensure your emails do not end up as spam?

It’s important to follow common rules and best practices when operating a mail server to guarantee your emails always reach their destination. In this quick guide, we’ll walk you through a few things to consider, to make sure that your emails always end up where you intend.

Reputation Management

Much of email delivery depends on your reputation, which is attached to your IPs and domains.

The two key-factors that we can influence are:

1. Ensure other servers can distinguish between genuine email coming from your server and spam coming from other servers, pretending to come from your server. If you don’t, a spammer can burn your hard-earned reputation while delivering their spam.

You can ensure this by enabling DKIM/DMARC and SPF protection in Plesk under “Server-Wide Mail Settings”.

2. Ensure your server does not send spam. While less of a problem if you don’t allow for public sign-ups, it is important to maintain vigilance against spammers on your own systems, otherwise your reputation will be impacted. If a spammer can gain illegitimate access to an account on your system, your reputation can be severely damaged.

To address these points you should:

• Use PPE to protect yourself against Cross-Site Request Forgery attacks that can be used to gain access to accounts.
• Maintain good password hygiene.
• Protect all your domains with valid TLS certificates.
• Use Plesk Email Security for outbound anti-spam and anti-virus:

• Use rate limitations on outbound email.

Finally, there are factors that we can’t completely control:

• The age of your domain will affect your reputation; a very new domain will always have a lower reputation.
• If you share your IP(s) with other people on the same system, you share part of their reputation.

By following these guidelines you can successfully run your own email server, and be confident that your emails will arrive unscathed at their intended destination.

Further Measures

• Set a maximum message size for outbound email. Most email services have a limit on the message size, and you should make sure that you are not sending messages larger than that limit. A good standard default is 35 MB.

• Require authentication for mail relays to keep an attacker from abusing your mail server.

Review Your Work

As your business continues to grow, it’s important to ensure your messages are delivered to the intended inboxes as planned. MxToolbox helps you check your deliverability. You can head over to MxToolbox and check if your system is set-up correctly.