This Raspberry Pi email server tutorial will take you through the steps on how to setup your very own email server that is both low cost and relatively versatile.
One of the many reasons to setup a personal server on the Pi is its low cost. The initial cost is low and the ongoing expenses is also relatively low due to the Raspberry Pi’s low power usage.
There are several other advantages to setting up a Raspberry Pi email server such as being able to utilize a custom domain name and having full control over your own personal communications. Since your emails are stored on your own personal server you will have no one scanning them so they can to try and present you with better advertisements. You can run this alongside an Apache web server for a complete setup.
Another great reason to setting up your own email server is that it’s a great learning experience when it comes configuring everything correctly. It can be hard setting this up as there are quite a few things that can go wrong and if you’re a beginner then troubleshooting may be a bit frustrating. The software itself is super easy to install but can be hard configuring it to work perfectly the first time so I have marked this project as intermediate difficulty.
If you plan on sending email you will need to make sure your ISP is not blocking port 25. This is quite common but can usually be unblocked if requested.
Equipment List
You can find all the pieces of equipment that I recommend for this Raspberry Pi email server tutorial. You really don’t need much so it should be a nice cheap project.
Recommended:
Raspberry Pi 2 or 3
Ethernet Cord or Wifi dongle (The Pi 3 has WiFi inbuilt)
Optional:
Installing the Citadel Email Server
As with almost every tutorial, I am running the default install of Raspbian. If you need to install it then be sure to check out my guide on installing Raspbian.
There are a few ways to install a email server on the Raspberry Pi, one of the most complicated ways is to install Postfix and Dovecot separately then installing a web frontend. Each of these components will then have to be individually configured and can become quite time consuming to set up correctly.
However, in our tutorial we will be utilizing a software package called Citadel. It is an easy to set up, powerful yet versatile mailing server. It heavily simplifies the process of setting up a email server and does not require extensive configuration to get it up and running. Best of all it is a 100% open source software.
For more detail: Raspberry Pi Email Server using Citadel
