I’ll figure out something, I always do, I just thought it would be nice to see what route others have taken with their own servers.

Yeah for sure. Sorry I don’t have a good answer

turned their email over to Microsoft and we’ve had nothing but non-stop spam, phishing attacks, outages, and the constant push of "oh if you’re not going to use a Microsoft product.

Just wanna share that my experience does not mirror this. I pay them $6/ user per month (which is just me, for me personally, to be fair), which gets me that hosted exchange server 365 thing. I only rarely, if ever, need to use the other office products, and I do so in my browser. In the 2ish years so far I’ve had no complaints. I don’t require any of the features that are locked behind full-installation variants of their products - and besides that I’ve had no problem with spam email especially.

Im not sure I would recommend that you tell your friends to authenticate with your own Active directory instance necessarily, but ultimately at the end of the day if you’re dealing with users you’ll need some kind of authentication layer (imo)

Oof yeah. You’re well into admin territory here.

I mean I’m just some layman on the internet, but I would look at tying in some authentication layer to get your 2FA, although it would inconvenience your users users.

Do your users use this service for srs business?

I don’t know if I have anything else to add to this discussion. It’s gotten more complex than what “just an email server” can provide imo

I would say white-list instead of black-list if possible.

Beside the point, have you considered the reasons why you might not want to run your own email server in todays age? It’s a fun experience for sure, but if you want it for serious use it’s not for the faint of heart (unfortunately).

Edit: also lol to your friend unknowingly conducting a spam campaign from your server