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PlausiDen — case study

PlausiDen

PlausiDen — company site, mail platform and the server under both

A company site written in Rust, on hardware I administer, with its own mail system rather than a rented inbox.

Visit plausiden
The PlausiDen home page as it looks today

What it runs on

Application
Rust, rendered to static pages — no CMS to be broken by an update
Server
Debian I administer directly, with Caddy in front and a hardened firewall
Mail
Postfix, Dovecot and OpenDKIM on the same machine, not a rented inbox
Also reachable
As a Tor hidden service

Why run your own mail

Running mail yourself is the part most people skip, and it is the part that decides whether a company's email lands in an inbox or a spam folder. A domain that publishes nothing is trivially forgeable, and its legitimate mail is treated with suspicion for exactly that reason.

The records that make mail trustworthy

SPF
Names which servers may send mail for the domain. Everything else is forged.
DKIM
Signs each message so the receiver can prove it was not altered in transit.
DMARC
Tells receivers what to do when the first two fail — and sends back reports so you find out.
MTA-STS
Requires that mail to the domain arrive over TLS, rather than quietly falling back to plaintext.

All four are published and monitored. That is not a feature anyone asks for by name; it is the difference between mail that arrives and mail that silently does not.