How to Receive Email at Home Through a VPS Gateway

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 16:25:12 +0300

I wanted a real mailbox on my home server: mail accepted from the Internet, filtered, stored locally, and available over IMAP. The awkward part was that the server sits behind a router I do not control.

That rules out the usual advice to forward ports 25, 587, and 993. It does not rule out self-hosting mail.

I already had a small VPS and a persistent reverse SSH tunnel from home to it. That was enough to split the system at a useful boundary:

Rspamd on DRM HSE

How to Receive Email at Home Through a VPS Gateway