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Running production mail on a VPS — install, deliverability, DKIM, DMARC, and RBL recovery.

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Connecting Thunderbird, iOS, and Android to your IMAP server

You've got Postfix + Dovecot running on your VPS. Now you want your laptop and phone to actually read and send mail through it. This article walks the…

DKIM key rotation playbook - rolling keys without breaking inbound mail

DKIM keys should be rotated periodically — annually at least, quarterly if you're being thorough. The trick is doing it without breaking in-flight mail that's…

Getting delisted from Spamhaus, UCEPROTECT, Barracuda - the realistic process

Your IP ended up on a blocklist. The procedure to get off varies by list, but the meta-process is consistent: fix the underlying cause, document the fix…

Greylisting on a mail server - when it helps, when it hurts

Greylisting is the technique of temporarily rejecting unknown sender/recipient pairs with a soft (4xx) error. Legitimate mail servers retry within minutes and…

Mail aliases, catch-all addresses, and virtual mailboxes

An alias forwards mail from one address to another; a virtual mailbox is a real account behind an arbitrary address. A catch-all delivers every undefined…

Mailcow on a LYLIX VPS - sizing, install, the post-install hardening pass

Mailcow is the easiest way to run a complete production mail stack on a single VPS — Postfix + Dovecot + Rspamd + SOGo webmail + a friendly admin UI, wrapped…

Migrating mail accounts off cPanel onto a self-managed VPS

You've decided to stop paying for cPanel hosting and run your mail on a LYLIX VPS instead. The web is plastered with "use our paid tool to migrate" articles…

Postfix + Dovecot from scratch - production-grade mail on a LYLIX VPS

Running your own mail server is harder than it was in 2005 but it's still very doable. This article walks the full Postfix + Dovecot setup on a current Debian…

Reading DMARC reports without losing your mind - the XML, the patterns, the action items

If you publish a DMARC record with a rua tag, receiving mail providers send you XML reports daily. Most people look at one, decide it's incomprehensible, and…

Routing outbound mail through SES, SendGrid, or Postmark

Running your own inbound mail server is reasonable; sending outbound mail from a fresh VPS IP is hard mode. The IP has no sender reputation, every major…

Sender reputation for a brand-new VPS IP - the warm-up strategy that actually works

A new VPS IP starts with no sender reputation. Whether the mail you send is delivered, spam-foldered, or rejected depends on how the first few weeks of traffic…

SpamAssassin vs Rspamd - choosing your spam filter

The two real choices for spam filtering on a self-hosted mail server are SpamAssassin (the 25-year-old default that ships with most mail packages) and Rspamd…

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