Selfhosted

You don't need your own email server to degoogle your life.

Fair enough - I got it working recently but it was the hardest self-hosting install I've done. No way most people would succeed. Email is 50(?) years of questionable design decisions piled on top of each other so it's become a whole world of weird stuff. Doing email should be it's own tech specialty, like 'devops' or 'db admin' is. There's enough depth to it.

There are a ton of email providers who are not Google, though. e.g. https://proton.me/mail. You don't need to run it on your own hardware.

This really saddens me. Email is such a fundamentally good and open protocol. The only reason people don’t like it is because of big tech’s shenanigans.

I run an email service called Port87. I invite you to try it and see if it can convince you that email is actually a great technology, when detached from big tech slop. It’s got some really killer features that make it great for organization and preventing spam. You can also tell it that on certain addresses, it should completely ignore the strict auth requirements it usually has, so it will accept email from your own services without you having to set up all the extra bullshit that’s meant for stuff that matters more.

What is the problem? I have been self hosting my mail for the last 20+ years and has always worked pretty well.

I rent a VPS for that since you should not use a residential address for email servers.

If you are careful enough to configure it properly I assure you that it works and it's perfectly usable and stable

All my family primary email addresses are managed in that way on my various domains and we never had a single issue

Today it's even easier because there are all in one docker based solutions. But going the hard way is perfectly doable as well.

Here is my experience, on my wiki, if you are interested https://wiki.gardiol.org/doku.php?id=email%3Astart

Be aware that there are no optional steps: everything must be properly installed and setup from DNS entries to dkim/dmarc and certificates. But I promise, maintenance it basically zero after a proper setup. And I think twice in 20 years something broke. And the nice part of that email will just be delayed and delivered after you fix it, nothing gets ever lost

I love email, with all it downfalls, it's still one of the most resilient and solid stuff on the internet.

Running your own email server is easy.

Getting your email accepted by other servers is hard.

Hosting anything publicly requires a significant amount of hardening.

Neither of those two tasks are easy or low maintenance. I self host almost everything and I’ve run my own mail server (with occasional rejection). It’s not worth it for me; I now use a commercial, paid provider for email.

I prefer to follow the advice from people who actually set up and maintain email servers: “Fucking don’t. It’s not worth it.”

Just get a custom domain and run it through an existing email provider.

I moved to https://mxroute.com/ and payed $15 for three years of hosting because they had some promotion.

I outsourced my email to a provider.
Works great and only costs me 8€ per month for not having to wrestle IP spamlists, mailserver maintenance and reachability.

Yeah, hosting your own email server is pretty tough.

I think something like https://migadu.com/ might be more in the middle of hosting your own server and purely using someone else's frontend.

I like email.

I pay for my own domain. I pay a privacy focused European provider for email and they let me use my own domain. I use an European DNS provider.

So I have email addresses with my own domain and the setup is pretty straightforward and I can use webmail or a desktop|mobile client.

Proton or Tuta mail. Supports aliasing so you can make unique email addresses per website, and trash them if you get spammed.

Singing up for a paid account you also get VPN, drive storage, password manager, docs, sheets, AI chat (I know), calendar, meetings and authenticator.

It's not really worth the trouble to try to host your own e-mail. There are lots of e-mail hosts that you can use with your own domain. A few of them are free and there are plenty of low cost ones. As long as you use your own domain, you can switch hosts whenever you want and keep your addresses.

i get it. i ran my own server for 15 years... and i stopped ~ 8 years ago. it was just too annoying between the spam filtering and -todays-new-security-enhancement-

email is the one service im happy to pay someone to do.. from a bunker in switzerland. google not required.

...but you cant not use email and function in the technological world of today. email isnt about communication any longer. its about security and authentication.

Just use mailbox.org or posteo.de . Using one of those providers is so much better than a Google mail address but so easier than hosting your own mail server.

just get a trustworthy hoster and a good client application. Boom, most of the benefits with none of the headache.

And yeah, E-Mail is, what a decade of expanding scope does to you.

Personally I don't self-host email :

• For personal emails, I use posteo.de
• For accounts, I use alias vault

You don't have to use Gmail. There are many, many other options.

Just get a domain and point it at a provider. Now you're not locked in and can switch at will upon enshittification. Get one of the offline mail archive services like OpenArchiver. Job done.

I rage guit my email server long ago. True, as evidenced in this thread, there are some who successfully run their own email server and that's awesome. I am quite jealous. I too gave up, but I went with a small EU based company. It's no frills, just the basics. I don't send/receive a lot of email, so I don't need all the bells and whistles. If you're de-googling your life, you don't have to specifically run your own email service. I do hear a lot of positives about MailCow tho.

Have you tried https://mailcow.email/

Its dockerized and preconfigured and cones with tools to manage. I am happy and I never wanted to touch mail.

Self host all the services you want, but don't ever touch sendmail and bind. The most constantly attacked services I've ever had my ass on the line for. I won't even manage them for money anymore.

I used to run my own mailserver, but I haven't in years now since it was so much of a pain. Not even the set-up part; that wasn't the worst thing in the world. It's uptime, back-ups, and other considerations that just require time and money I don't have.

I mean I did an email transfer as a multihat guy at a small business and mx records are a bitch. granted more so because there needs to be no loss or delay. might be easier for an individual. but I don't roll my own.

Damn I been using Gmail since the invite days. How does one even transfer their Gmail account? Best case to just set a POP service or mail forwarding to a new one?

https://hub.docker.com/r/mailserver/docker-mailserver/

It just works. Once you got it working.

What is a good, paid email service that is

1. Not expensive
2. Can be payed wity crypto
3. Can use my own domain

?

People repeat and repeat that email is hard but it's a legend. I have been self hosting for years on a residential ip and a random domain and it just works

I dunno, mailcow dockerized seems to work ok for me. That being said, e-mail is so 20th century.

I also use mxroute. I paid for ten years at once. I only needed it because I wanted a catch-all and my previous hosting provider stopped allowing that.

My email solution for decades has been to have a mailbox separate from my email domain. Currently it’s FastMail. I then give out a different entity@example.com to each entity that needs my email address. I can then shut off (route to null) any address that starts getting spam.

I did order Run Your Own Mail Server because one day I’d like to try.

From the Kickstarter:

Running a mail server is an advanced systems administration skill, though. Mind tricks are not enough. You need to be able to operate a Unix-like operating system, understand logging and TLS, make DNS changes and adjust packet filters. RYOMS takes you through the protocol, configuring Postfix and Dovecot, and the DKIM and SPF and DMARC authentication protocols. (They’re not proper authentication protocols, but that’s what the Empire calls them.) It covers anti-spam measures, mail filters, and virtual domains, all at the command line and with pretty web interfaces. While the reference platforms are Debian and FreeBSD, the Postfix and Dovecot servers and assorted infrastructure work on any open source Unix.

This book does not contain absolutely everything you might ever need to understand running a mail server. Every environment has its oddities. But it does contain the core knowledge that every mail administrator must have. A sysadmin with this orientation can sort out their edges easily enough. Coping with edges is what we do.

I'm sorry to great it's been so frustrating for you. I know we all have our own tolerances for random junk and I'm glad you're making the right decision for you at this time.

I've been running mailinabox for almost two years now and it has been very good for me. Especially once I send some email to my family members' Gmail address and had them Mark it as "not spam" my deliverability has become very good.

If you want to give it another try, I've used Mailcow for about a decade now, after running on Exchange for twenty before that. Mailcow is way easier to set up and maintain than Exchange.

Key to it all is making sure you have your DKIM, dmarc and SPF records set up correctly, as well as a PTR with your internet provider if you can manage it, though that seems optional.

Never had a problem with the big providers bouncing my mails, just a couple little outfits that couldn't figure their filters out correctly.