Yes, I’m not an IT professional and don’t have education in anything related to computers. Has always been a hobby for me. I don’t want to do my hobbies for work because I fear it would take the fun out.

Do you mean to don’t write some message to root@xolat.games? 🤔

You can, but most email servers redirect mail to root@xolat.games to some other user eg xolatgames@xolat.games. The root user usually does not have their own inbox.

I’m not sure why hello is trying to write to /home/root then, that’s your problem. Do you have any Postfix aliases set up? Check /etc/postfix/aliases (there’s a chance it’s in a different location; the output of postconf alias_maps will tell you where it is).

But what’s the configs do you need? 🤔 Dovecot has about 20 separated configuration files! Do I will need to put each of them?

Just post the output of doveconf -n. Redact any sensitive info.

Just reading the first logs you pasted, it tells you the answer there. You can’t receive emails because you’re trying to receive emails as root, and writing emails to the home directory. Dovecot doesn’t run as root so it can’t write to root’s home directory.

You would ordinarily not receive mail as root. Most people set up root to redirect to your actual user. Look into Postfix aliases.

Try emailing a non-root user. It should write to the inbox. I mean, without your Dovecot configs, I can’t tell if there’s anything else wrong with them, but from the errors it seems Dovecot would work if not for the permissions errors.

Tbh was quite painless for me! Had a few hiccups but it was educational to troubleshoot them, and once it’s up and running, I haven’t had to touch it for the most part. Had to update my Dovecot configs when they changed the config syntax but that’s all I can think of. And will probably see about switching from spamassassin to rspamd because I swear spamassassin has so many false positives no matter how many false positives I feed to it to train it. But it’s really not so bad, and I would recommend it as a decent learning opportunity for folks who like tinkering with computers.

Email’s probably the most satisfying. I learnt a lot in setting up my own email server, and it’s nice being in complete control (well, of my end of things at least, ofc not of the other person’s end) of such an essential service.

Matrix works well for me.

It’s not out yet, but I’d keep an eye on Flatline. It’s by the people who make Molly (Signal client fork—it’s pretty good, been using it for years). Flatline is a Molly-compatible server implementation, i.e. so that you can host your own Signal server. Because generally if someone asked for a “reliable messenger for family use” I’d recommend Signal as a polished and reliable option, though not self-hostable unfortunately.