2025-09-26 –, A209
Even in today's day and age of various free email options and commoditization of email services, there's still many good reasons for running your own mail server - privacy and security just being two of them.
In this tutorial, we'll use bhyve and jails to set up a FreeBSD lab with
- postfix smtp server with support for virtual users and multiple domains
- spam assassin spam filter
- amavis virus scanner
- cyrus imap server
- nextcloud webmail with 2-factor auth
- setting up dkim and dmarc
- improved security with pf, fail2ban, sshguard and vnet jails
- caveats and pitfalls
and we'll take a look at the usual management activities for the mail system.
Some key learnings you'll take away:
- Using bhyve inside jails
- Setting up your own mail server
- The prerequisites required to successfully run your own mail server
- how to automate the whole process - have your own mailserver up in a few minutes!
Born and raised in Austria, Chris studied Computer Science at the University of Technology in Vienna, Austria. He's been in IT since the late 90s and started working with FreeBSD around release 5. For the past 14 years he's worked in the construction industry in various IT management roles.
In 2021 he first became more active in the community by becoming a port maintainer and when Greg Wallace at the FreeBSD Foundation founded the Enterprise Working Group in 2023, he joined as volunteer. Since then, he's been an active contributor around bhyve and documentation, working on making FreeBSD even more useful and usable for enterprise use.
You can find Chris on LinkedIn as well as the regular Laptop and Desktop Workgroup Calls (https://wiki.freebsd.org/LaptopDesktopWorkingGroup)