I’m contemplating taking control of my email by moving away from mainstream providers like Gmail or Outlook. What self-hosted email services have you tried, and which ones do you find most reliable and user-friendly? Are there any challenges or advantages you’ve encountered in making the switch?

  • Ok_Construction4430@alien.topBEnglish
    2·
    11 months ago

    I wouldnt selfhost my e-mail. You will quickly be blacklisted since your server wont have a good reputation and will have issues sending out emails to peers.

    • smileymattj@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      Rackspace gets blacklisted exactly twice a year, like clockwork. So how’s it any worse?

    • bermudi86@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      I love these pessimistic, ignorant takes because at the end of the day I get more money running (setting and basically forgetting) email servers for paranoid people.

      Send your marketing emails from somewhere else and you’ll never have issues

  • scalyblue@alien.topBEnglish
    2·
    11 months ago

    Trust me you do not want to point an MX record at your houses IP. It’s a terrible idea, dont do it, I don’t have the energy to qualify that statement but just trust me, don’t.

    • Joyfulsinner@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      I’m sorry but a statement like this make me not trust you at all. Take an strangers word for something with no evidence…. This is how a mob of ignorant people do stupid things.

  • firebird789@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    Mailcow is pretty straightforward to setup and has good documentation. No matter what you choose though be prepared to put a decent amount of work into it. I also recommend using an SMTP relay like SendGrid or Mailgun. That way you don’t have to worry about deliverability as much. If you’re not planning on sending a lot of email (<100 emails a day for SendGrid) you can use their free tiers.

    • Dr_Fu_Man_Chu@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      Selfhosting is always best. I just cannot trust remote providers with my mails. Only caviat is you usually need a small server with static IP, most providers block emails delivered from ISPs.

  • PaulEngineer-89@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    Disagree with 99% of the other posts. If you self-host your email it is archived on your system. So-called “private” email isn’t after 6 months in the US. And it is more stable and higher performance to run my own Roundcube webmail on my own server. And I can control the spam filtering. All reasons to host your own.

    However there is some “maintenance” involved with unscrupulous black list sites and overzealous email filter software. Google likes to declare basically everything not coming from their buddies as spam Microsoft wants you to kiss the ring. On a work account just this week I tried contacting a German company called Beckhoff and after just 3 “dead” email accounts from previous contacts they decided to ban my entire company (about 100 employees, been in business over 75 years). They also don’t answer their phones. Not sure if they’re still in business or just being German jerks. As a result of their poor performance we may switch to a competitor. I do not put up with that crap.

    Also I’m not sure how to phrase this politely but despite promises unless you are using PGP to end-to-end encrypt your email, and even then it’s not 100%, you can’t ever totally make it private. Also it is impossible to totally ensure identity of the sender although we’ve come a long way. Protonmail recently published how they delivered a criminal to the authorities using the small amount of public information they log.

    As a result I do agree that you should let someone else deal with the black listers, bans, etc. But I strongly disagree with keeping it on a remote server more than about 10 minutes. That means one of three options (for receiving:

    1. If you have a static ipv4 IP use the email service on Cloudflare to act as a mail relay and forward email to your server. Thus Cloudflare’s reputation not yours is what matters.
    2. If you don’t have a static address, you can rent a VPS. Low end box (lowendbox.com) has some great coupons all the time. You can get easily under $12/year. In this case tunnel from your actual server to the VPS. We really don’t “need” the VPS.
    3. Pay for a forwarding server. I used Dynu in the past. Never had an issue. It was I think $10/year. Again this assumes you have an accessible server on a static or dynamic ip. And you are basically paying for what Cloudflare does for free.
    4. Pay for webmail. Again Dynu is $20. Then just program your local webmail to call imap and download everything say every 5 minutes. But it limits you to ONE user or each user doing their own thing.

    On server dovecot and sendmail work well. Roundcube looks exactly like an improved gmail.

    For sending I use smtp2go. At my low usage entire family is free.

  • factulas@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    Being this is self hosted, I have heard great things about redmail once you get it configured. Soon, to give it a shot. Made it past my 15GB on Google and would rather pay for a droplet.

    • solarsparq@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      I bought into Fastmail about 10 years ago (for 7 years) & recently moved to Proton about 5 years ago. Both are excellent privacy-first providers. Gmail is my junk e-mail at this point. Good recommendation. Australia-based business. Fastmail & Proton are my votes. I tried self-hosting for a few years & would agree with below – too many issues with blacklists. This is one you should consider paying for.

      • speedcuber111@alien.topBEnglish
        1·
        11 months ago

        I’m getting tired of not having IMAP/SMTP access with Protonmail. How would you recommend Fastmail? Anything negative?

  • wyrmroot@programming.devEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    Rather than self host, I switched to Protonmail. I use a custom domain with catchall addresses enabled, so I can have an arbitrary number of email addresses grouped by what service it relates to, along with plenty of filtering and organization rules. So far it’s been nothing but upside, honestly.