Self-Hosted Email Archives

How Modern Secure and Self-Hosted Messaging has Become a Cornerstone for Teams Worldwide

The current pandemic has accelerated the way we work together with teams worldwide and across all industries. And for this reason, modern workplace messaging has become a common interface for people and software to collaborate.

For many years, companies of all shapes and sizes have been looking for collaboration platforms. They are aiming to drive innovation while maintaining control and security over their most sensitive data. And here’s where messaging and collaboration platforms give development teams precisely what they need. That’s a workspace that allows them to be more productive while meeting IT and security teams’ control requirements.

Solutions like Mattermost and Plesk Premium Email, powered by Kolab, are excellent examples of this. Read more to find out why.

Introducing the Mattermost Extension

Mattermost is an open source messaging and developer collaboration platform that meets businesses’ trust and security requirements. From piloting spacecraft and ensuring national security to building electric cars and advancing vital infrastructure – enterprises use Mattermost daily to change the world.

Benefits of Working with Mattermost

A modern enterprise collaboration platform can increase organizational agility by bringing conversations, software, and data together. Mattermost not only makes DevOps collaboration more powerful through integrations with existing tools and systems. It also automates workflow allowing continuous integration and deployment. Let’s run through all its benefits:

Privacy, security, and compliance. Mattermost lets you keep full control of your messages, data, and intellectual property. It also runs your vital communications behind your firewall, self-hosted on the cloud of your choice and under your existing security and IT policies. And you can use its auditing tools to meet compliance requirements.
Productivity and agility. Mattermost empowers development teams to build workflow, ship software faster, and collaborate confidently.
Extensibility. Through integrations with other services and internal systems, it allows increasing ROI on existing software investments.
Open Source. As an open source platform, Mattermost ensures that teams are completely free to develop additional features without any restrictions.

Mattermost for Plesk Premium Email – The Perfect Match

Many of the world’s leading high-security enterprises work better with Mattermost by connecting people, tools, and automation across tens of thousands of users. And that’s why Mattermost integrates with Plesk Premium Email, powered by Kolab, acting as a secure chat module for the web client. With this union, teams are not only more connected and productive – they thrive!

Mattermost is supported on Plesk 17.8 or later, installed on the following Linux distributions: CentOS 7, Debian 8 and 9, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, and Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04.

It’s also worth noting that, additionally, Mattermost has some requirements when working with Plesk. The domain must be secured with a valid SSL certificate, and NGINX must be enabled in proxy mode. Also, on CentOS 7 and RHEL 7, it’s required to install Postgres 9.4 on the system that is incompatible with the PostgreSQL component.

Unlock Your Self-Hosted Email’s Full Potential

The Mattermost extension for Plesk Premium Email serves as a secure messaging platform, allowing teams to have more excellent connectivity. And enabling security for your business and teams even when remote.

Plesk’s self-hosted online office brings people, discussions, bots, tools, and files together. This shared workspace lets groups collaborate in real-time throughout the project lifecycle. Also, Mattermost’s self-hosted approach provides modern communication benefits without sacrificing privacy, giving more control to teams. Read more best practices for running a self-hosted email server here.

On top of this, with the Plesk Email Security extension, you can also synchronize email, calendars, contacts, files, and notes on any desktop or mobile device. You can set up auto-responders or allow real-time notifications for emails. Cloud storage, including WebDAV, lets you securely access files from anywhere. And it’s easy to integrate anti-spam filters so that your mailbox stays safe from viruses and spam. Not bad – huh?

Licensing

Mattermost is included in Plesk Premium eMail in the fully featured free open source edition that you can host for yourself or your customers. If you are interested in upgrading to the Mattermost Enterprise edition, you can try it for free, or easily purchase a license key from Mattermost directly.

To compare Mattermost’s open source edition versus their enterprise edition, please refer to this page: https://mattermost.com/pricing-feature-comparison/

So, are you ready to give Plesk Premium Email and Mattermost a try? Get a detailed look into all their features here and here. Go ahead – your team is waiting!

Get Mattermost for Plesk Premium Email

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.

Please note that there might be different types of setups where you can either influence these things or not:

If you’re running your own server (or VPS – virtual private server) or a bunch of servers with Plesk for shared hosting with WHMCS, you have full influence and control about the following settings.
If you’re an end customer or reseller of a service provider or hoster using Plesk, unfortunately only your hosting provider can do these modifications for you. In case you want to regain control of your environments, it’s time to move your shared hosting account to your own VPS!
If you run Plesk on one of the hyperscale cloud providers such as DigitalOcean, Linode, AWS/Lightsail, Azure, or Google, your default email / SMTP (Port 25 or not) might be blocked on the infrastructure level. If that’s the case, you might need to contact their support to unblock it. In addition, also check that you’re receiving a reverse DNS entry for your IP that is required for operating an email server properly.

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 Plesk Premium Email 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. This is especially important in shared hosting environments where multiple customers or domains are sharing the same IP. So you can avoid IP reputation issues if one of your customers is making problems. And avoid that one customer is impacting others.

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. This is for example the case if you have only a shared hosting or reseller account of shared hosting companies.
And in case you want to be in a better shape, we highly recommend that you run your own VPS/VM. You might also want to check your IP address that you get from your provider against its reputation before you take your server into production.

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.

email Email Server Kolab Plesk Email Security Plesk Premium Email Self-Hosted Email Spam

Enable Security for Your Business and Teams Even When Remote

Hackers are a notoriously opportunistic lot, and the global COVID-19 pandemic fits their agenda perfectly. According to UK Web security firm Cloudflare, online threats rose by as much as six times their usual levels in the early weeks of the outbreak. Based on the 2020 Data Breaches Investigation Report by Verizon, 28% of the breach victims were small businesses. And from an Accenture report from last year, 68% of business leaders felt their cybersecurity risks are increasing. It’s no wonder that in the wake of recent trends, security has become a top priority for small and medium businesses.

Choose Targeted Security Solutions

“WordPress Toolkit security scanner goes beyond the basics and implements the latest security recommendations and best practices from WP Codex and WP security experts.”

Marcus Krämer, CEO of HostPress

At Plesk, our goal is to prioritize your privacy and safeguard your data and business from security threats. Our tools provide targeted solutions for common security issues with little to no manual work. For example, we asked Marcus Krämer, the founder and CEO of HostPress, about the value WordPress Toolkit brings to their Managed WordPress hosting business. Marcus told us that, “WordPress Toolkit security scanner goes beyond the basics and implements the latest security recommendations and best practices from WP Codex and WP security experts.”

Key Recommendations to Improve Security

Recently, we also talked to Plesk’s Security Engineer, Igor Antipkin, about recommendations that can help you improve your project’s security. Igor outlined the following steps for anyone considering to take proper security approaches:

1. Use threat modeling to identify potential security risks.

As a first step, consider your security risks in the project design phase. List down all kinds of threats you might have. One advantage of using this approach is minimizing the likelihood of security breaches. It also saves you rework in the later stages of your project.

2. Inform yourself and your users about security risks.

Outdated software is the most common problem in this scenario. Make sure that your users know to keep software up to date and all the latest updates and patches are installed. Inform yourself about software security as much as you can. Stay involved in the community to stay up to date about potential issues.

3. Use the principle of least privileges.

Limit user permissions based on individual roles to give access where it’s needed. This limits the amount of damage any single individual can do to a website or server.

Special Offers

To round up, our umbrella of tools with a focus on security include:

Our self-hosted email and collaboration suite, Plesk Premium Email, powered by Kolab. It includes a secure, private file cloud using Seafile and a secure team messaging platform using Mattermost. You can also enhance email security with the Plesk Email Security extension.
If you use Plesk with WordPress, you can use the WordPress Toolkit to optimize your site’s security. WordPress Toolkit hardens your site by default and is enhanced with the Toolkit’s security scanner, which provides up-to-date recommendations for managing site security.
If you are a hosting reseller, with Plesk’s Web Host Edition you can easily manage teams. You have the ability to set permissions for individual users, developers, designers and content managers, who can seamlessly collaborate across multiple projects. You can also create customer accounts so that external administrators can manage their own services. The edition comes with security for protection from malicious users.

Currently, you can get 6 months free for Plesk Premium Email, 6 months free for WordPress Toolkit for 3 months free for Plesk Web Host Edition. Additional details about these offers can be found here.

We understand that these unprecedented times have brought unprecedented circumstances to us all. You can reach out to our team for support. And let us know in the comments if you’d like to share how your business is doing in the current situation.