It’s not essential to have that record. I ran a mail server for a year without it and no problems sending to anyone at all. Having said that, it is very good practice to have it -you’re correct. And I second that it cannot work with ddns.
I did have spf, dkim and dcim records. Add these to the list of good practice.
Ironically, my server is set up to block inbound mail from servers without reverse dns. That rule blocks a lot of mail but it is all spam. I have no doubt that dnsbl rules would step in if I deleted that rule.
You’re right, nothing specific to SMTP. I am not well versed enough in protocols to know if a reverse proxy would work for an email server and was hoping someone more knowledgeable would answer the question
I’m still in a research phase to see what is possible and what costs (money and time) are involved in each method. My friends and I are currently using just enough storage (20-35GB) that most VPS providers would charge about $20+/month due to storage capacity alone. So I started researching what it might cost to run a physical server at home. The segmenting and firewalling of my home network is an acceptable cost because I think I want to do it anyway.
Spectrum is in my area and their website advertises $65/month for “business class” with the same bandwidth I have now and another $15/month for a static IP. I still need to call them and ask what is included in that plan, but it might be worth it if I can run an email server with that.
That sounds like a really great idea. Thank you. What do you recommend for getting started with the design you described? I’m used to FreeBSD, but used a little bit of CentOS at work, too. I’d be willing to learn most Unix-like systems.
Well, it’ll still be a potential help with websites. Thank you for sharing this! I enjoy learning about networking tricks like this one. And maybe someone will come along and fill in the gaps in our mutual knowledge.
If you pay 20$ per month for a VPS with just 35GB of disk space, you are serverly overpaying. That‘s easily available for ~5$/month without even considering the super cheap providers and that‘s why I meant it‘s probably cheaper to get an VPS than to get a static IP.
I’d get a VPS from any provider you want (just make sure it has a static IPv4 address), configure and test (ping) a Wireguard tunnel between VPS and your local server.
Once you have that, try to expose a simple web server through it and see if you can access it via VPS’s public IP, and go from there.
