welcome! 👋🏻

Would you mind saying what instructions / guidance you followed for setting up your server? And an idea of just how much troubleshooting...?!

#chatmail setup docs are here https://github.com/chatmail/server/
if you hit any problem feel free to open an issue in the same repo.

Popular problems:
- DNS settings (a zone file is provided but most providers don't allown importing)
- getting your hosting provider to allow sending and receiving to/at port 25

Hey, sorry. Somehow I missed these mentions. I used the official delta instructions. The two snags I ran into were setting up opendkim. When the script was generating keys, it was failing since the command needed to be run with sudo. I had to manually edit the script to include that. This may just be a quirk of my VPS.

Second thing was getting an SSL certificate. The first run was fine, but I messed some other stuff up and just restarted my VPS from scratch. The second time trying to get the SSL was a pain. Turned out I had to go into my DNS and delete all of the chatmail script entries and try again. It took longer than I care to admit to figure that one out.

The two things that @delta mentioned are important too. I'm using cloudflare and racknerd. Cloudflare allows importing DNS, which makes adding all the entries way easier, and racknerd is cheap and doesn't block any ports. I'll eventually probably try and move away from cloudflare and to a non-US VPS, but I wanted to get it setup cheaply and minimize any potential issues for my first setup.

DNS, DKIM and SSL are indeed the common choke points. Thanks for persevering and for providing info! Could make sense to keep notes about various hosters in the server repo.

Cloudflare is kind of ok ... As long as you have control over DNS you can change that later. Chatmail servers have automatic recovery even after all server state is catastrophically lost. This is a very nice property.

Rather to my surprise I seem to have managed to set up my own chatserver, following (both) your instructions. I do have a follow-up question though. How security-hardened would you say the standard configuration is? Do you have any advice on firewalling etc?

Delta Chat is an impressive piece of work.
#deltachat

congrats! Chatmail servers use standard postfix/docecot/nginx configs in a very minimal way. There also isn't much data to grab when someone still manages to hack it. And even if hacked, users will not get compromised in green-checkmarked chats. DDOS attacks are a potential issue though.

Services that #chatmail adds like "filtermail" run as its own user or as "vmail" if they need to access mailboxes. "echobot" is sandboxed to some extent using systemd.