Raspberry Pi DIY email server: Serve your own instead of in the cloud

Back in the day, you’d have your personal letters delivered to your mailbox outside your house. They’d be sealed, and it was a crime (and still is) to open someone else’s mail – at least in some countries.

Email has been around for decades, and there’s hardly a person out there who doesn’t have at least one email address in 2022. You have one, but, where are your emails being stored when they arrive in the middle of the night? If it’s your personal email, it’s more than likely sitting on the servers of corporate behemoths such as Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo. Not only that, but your “envelopes” aren’t sealed from the “postal service” – oh no, your mail is lying there open for them and their advertising and tracking bots to build up quite an in-depth profile on you, your preferences, and your behavior.
 

David Rutland decided that this is no way to keep your private life private, and implemented an email server on his own computer – yes, our favorite little computer, the Raspberry Pi! No extra hardware is required, just your trusty Pi and a domain name.

The Raspberry Pi small, energy-efficient, and thus perfectly suitable to keep running around the clock, and all you need for a place to send your email is a domain name. The software, scripts, and configuration settings have all been taken care of for you in this article by David over on makeuseof.com!
 

When you’re done setting it all up, subscribe to our Elektor E-zine here – we’d love to be the first email on your new, private email server.