Digital Independence: now we have our own mail server

Digital independence: now we have our own mail server

There’s something deeply satisfying about pressing “Send” and knowing that message won’t pass through anyone else’s servers. No third-party providers deciding whether, when and how your mail gets delivered. As of today, inside our web farm, we have a completely autonomous SMTP server, built, configured and managed directly by us. And it works great.

The idea had been brewing for a while, but the turning point came a few days ago, when smtpserver.com — the commercial service known to many as TurboSMTP — went offline due to a serious fire in a NorthC data center in the Netherlands. Thousands of companies across Europe suddenly found themselves unable to send transactional emails, newsletters, system notifications. A single physical event, hundreds of kilometers away, brought to its knees the communications of who knows how many businesses that thought they’d made themselves safe by relying on a “professional” service. It’s in moments like these that you realize how fragile it is to depend on infrastructure you don’t control.

With us, things now work differently. Outgoing mail passes through a machine that lives in our cabinet, powered by our connection, configured according to our rules. Emails are digitally signed with DKIM, authenticated via SPF, monitored with DMARC — all the modern deliverability standards are in place, and the tests confirm it. Gmail accepts our emails straight into the inbox, without warnings, without hesitation. The providers that matter recognize our server as legitimate, and that’s already a small big achievement.

And in case anyone thinks we’re selling smoke, you can check for yourself in thirty seconds. Go to mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx and run these three tests, choosing the lookup type from the dropdown next to the orange button:

• SPF Record Lookup on outbound.triplefreedom.com → you’ll find the record v=spf1 a:server.triplefreedom.com -all, which authorizes a single server in the world to send email for that domain: ours.

• DKIM Lookup on outbound.triplefreedom.com with selector mta2026 → you’ll find the RSA public key with which we digitally sign every outgoing message.

• DMARC Lookup on outbound.triplefreedom.com → you’ll find our authentication policy, complete with the address where aggregate reports are received.

Those who prefer the terminal can get the same information even faster with dig TXT outbound.triplefreedom.com +short for SPF, and dig TXT mta2026._domainkey.outbound.triplefreedom.com +short for the DKIM key. And anyone who receives an email from us can open the message headers and look for the Authentication-Results lines: they’ll find dkim=pass, spf=pass, dmarc=pass, with the signing domain outbound.triplefreedom.com and the selector mta2026. The server that originated the message is called server.triplefreedom.com, resolved via reverse DNS to an IP address registered in our name with our business connectivity. No intermediary, no black box, everything transparent and inspectable.

But beyond the technical side, what really excites us is the principle. In an age when everything seems to push us toward dependence on big cloud platforms, where every essential service is “outsourced” to someone else who decides for you, building a piece of autonomous infrastructure is an almost countercurrent act. It means having control, it means being able to tell the clients we host that their mail leaves from a dedicated, known, monitored machine. It means that if tomorrow Aruba changes the rules, if ElasticEmail raises its prices, if another data center catches fire somewhere in Europe, we keep sending emails without batting an eye.

Our web farm grows one piece at a time, calmly and methodically. Reverse proxy, WordPress hosting, internal file sharing, and now a mail server too. Each piece is a small declaration of technological independence. It’s not the easiest path — it would have been much quicker to pay someone else a monthly fee and forget about it — but it’s the one that lets us look our systems in the eye and say: “we manage this, and it works because we know how it works”.

Triple Freedom: the name is no accident. Freedom to choose, freedom to build, freedom not to depend. One email at a time.