Am 18.09.2026 um 22:46 schrieb Robert B. Carleton: > If you're new to email, you'll have to learn SPF, DMARC, and DKIM > records in DNS. The PTR record for your host is also important. It > has the match the forward address. Verify your VPS IP is not black > listed before doing anything else. Those are the key areas to know. > Reputable SMTP services are kind of tricky. Good luck!
Really depends on the way the setup is going to be used and especially depends on the endpoints involved. Setting up an MTA to receive and send mail is really straightforward. Just make sure that MTA provides a very flexible configuration syntax to allow tweaking the setup to interoperate with all kinds of broken crap. Personally I am running sendmail, spamass-milter, clamav-milter, greylist-milter, cyrus imapd since decades. Over those decades some SPF and lately DKIM records had to be added to DNS and dkim-milter added to to chain. Sendmail acts as a plain MTA on port 25 and a MSA on port 465 with authentication and let's encrypt certificates in place. All communication is encrypted as much as possible. The mail queue and the imap spool on that VPS remains cleartext, of course. Gaining privacy on anything virtual there seems to be quite some work going on to make RAM encryption a reality. So even if you could manage to encrypt all files on disc and manage to encrypt all traffic, the moment the clear text data hits memory, it is visible to the hypervisor and what not. Regards, -- Christian
