Selfhosted

Just a mailbox at IONOS for 1x Busimess plan and 25 free (2gb) mailbox.
Costs me 7€ per month. And so far almost zero downtime.

Agree with most folks here, mail is too hard to self host because of the control larger providers hold around acceptance rules. I use zoho for my email, been pretty solid so far though I'm sure there are others. I use nextcloud for contacts, tried using nextcloud for calendar but had trouble getting it to send invites to people so I just use zoho for calendar as well now.

Off site fallback I sync email, calendar and contacts to multiple machines but I also use back blaze as an off site cloud backup. One day I'll get around to syncing the emails to my home server and also backing those up to backblaze.

This is all for personal use though, if I was doing anything enterprise or mission critical I'd just pay another provider to do it who isn't a vibe coded nonsense factory.

I self-host it with https://gitlab.com/simple-nixos-mailserver/nixos-mailserver.

• I had to set it up with all these SPF and DKIM and DMARC stuff. Wasn't too hard, just follow the guide. Test with GMail - the message details view says exactly what you have, what you haven't, and what's wrong.
• Every now and then I have to jump through some hoops to get my IP allowlisted in some weird provider or antispam system.

Email is a very old protocol, it originates from the time when computers were connected only occasionally. It is very much possible to come an agreement to power up the antennas at something o'clock every day to exchange emails, and the rest of the time they just sit in the queue.

Practically speaking, if your home lab is down for something like 12h, it should not impact email delivery much at all - the sending servers would just keep retrying. Usually for 48h. From https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5321#section-4.5.4.1

mail that cannot be transmitted immediately MUST be queued and periodically retried by the sender.

The sender MUST delay retrying a particular destination after one attempt has failed.

Retries continue until the message is transmitted or the sender gives up; the give-up time generally needs to be at least 4-5 days.

Microsoft documents this: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/defender-office-365/mail-flow-about#mail-flow-delivery-faq

Deferred messages remain in our queues for one day.

I guess technically they're RFC-compliant, but 1 day is not as much as I'd like...

I’m going back to my KISS mindset.

I got the Mozilla ThunderMail invite and using ThinderBird for the client. It’s all basic, direct and just works.

1. Get cheap Hetzner VPS with redundant volume.
2. Get a domain name.
3. Run Stalwart for you mail server.
4. Run Bulwark for your inbox web app.
5. Run Kanidm for an identity provider.
6. Configure these DNS records: MX, SPF, DKIM and DMARC

There are more details, but those are the basics.

I'm hosting my own, on a dedicated Hetzner server (used for a bunch of stuff, "dedicated" as in "only me on the hardware"), using nixos-mailserver.

I've a 10/10 score on all the spam tests / deliverability tests I could find. The only deliverability issue I've ever had is t-online, but only because they require you to apply for being allowlisted, lmao. (Was one quick email to do that though, so... fine.)

It's been a couple of years of smooth sailing now, so I'm not super worried anymore; esp. in the beginning though, it was a bit anxiety-inducing (and I did cause some downtime by fucking up my bootloader and needing a KVM from Hetzner at one point, that was a very sweaty evening not least because the email address I had put for contact info was, well, handled by the server that was down. Btw Hetzner email you the link to your KVM. Fun times!).

Anyways: I'm really happy with my setup now, in all aspects. Calendar and contacts self-hosting is also great.

But, just so you know: you will not be able to do this on your residential IP. Doesn't matter how hard you try, it will not work. You'll be able to receive emails no problem, but if you're lucky you'll end up in people's spam folder. More likely, the recipient server will just outright reject or discard your mail.

Mail is a piece of software I won't bother self-hosting. I already tried, put in it a lot of time, trying to get my IP address considered safe because it was banned 15 years before I had it, to only have a third of my mail sent successfully received. It is not worth the effort and I switched to proton and recently to infomaniak.

Mail is something I don't want to touch. I use mailbox which is hosted in germany for some years now. For calendar & contacts I use the built-in Nextcloud apps, they also work pretty well

Edit: I self-host Nextcloud, so contacts & calender are on my private server

Mailo.com is a privacy friendly email provider in France. As far as I know they do only email.

Recently they upped the prices a bit, my account is from before that, and payed 60 euro for five years.

Iirc hosting your own mailboxes is easy. Making sure others can actually get your sent emails is a pain in the arse. It's a cartel.

One thing you should know, the SMTP protocol is designed to work with intermittent network connections like modem, each email has several days of grace period, with many retries, so you don't need 99.999% uptime.

Hosting in Aus, dovecot + postfix. It's been solid.

I've self-hosted email for over 20 years but I'm now moving to Fastmail for two reasons: (1) succession, I'm the only one in my house that understands how it works, and (2) email is never fully under your control and the large providers may decide to filter/drop email from your domain. But this is self-hosted, and I did enjoy my years doing it, so go for it if you want. I had good luck with OpenBSD/OpenSMTPD/Dovecot stack. Good luck!

Edit: I forgot to mention you can do a hybrid approach; handle receiving yourself and use a service like smtp2go.com to do delivery.

I self-host a metric fuck tonne of services and (with my extensive email background) I choose to outsource my email services.

You CAN do it today. But should you? Given DMARC, SPF, etc... No.

Since I left Gmail's free GAFYD feature, I moved to Fastmail (Australian) years ago. Does it cost money? Yes. Does it do everything I want? Yes. Does it have features Google would never provide? Yes.

Do I have any reservations or regrets? No.

I run mailcow on a vps on a smaller, reputable, European host. I started out with Hetzner but there I had problems with delivery due to a bad neighbourhood. It really helps with a host that cares and take abuse seriously.

After moving it's mostly been good. I don't have any issues with outgoing mail, all seems to land fine on both gmail/outlook etc. It's pretty low effort, just need to stay on top of upgrades since there are internet exposed services.

Here is also a good post about best practice for smaller servers: https://bridge.grumpy-troll.org/2020/07/small-mailserver-bcp/

I have a filter that encrypts all incoming mail with my pgp public key, for added security (this is not bullet proof as it has to sit after rspamd but should make it harder to read any mails in case of any kinds of breaches).

Best I can figure, choose a company that has well established general hosting services and get email through them.

It's going ro be really interesting to see if Thunderbird is able to make a good alternative. I really like the direction they are going, but time will tell if is sustainable for them and users alike.

Personally, I'm using Hostinger, which is reasonable and reliable.

Some people are relying on specialty private email providers like Proton or Tuta, but I have a big dose of skepticism. Lots of people are canceling their Proton subscriptions, and Tuta depends on using their clients because of the secure way it's built.

I would not be interested in attempting to self-host email. The service itself is trivial for an experienced network person (which I'm not), but the big picture is impossibly complex. There is a complicated and somewhat opaque reputation system that will arbitrarily block a lot of self-hosted email services. Some people have found ways to make it work, but it always seems pretty tenuous to me.

As far as email archiving, I highly recommend self-hosted Bichon, which I have run for a while and love it. I keep a few months of email locally, and the rest is on my server backup. It's straightforward to setup and use, fast searches, easy automations, etc.

As others have said, radicale is excellent for hosting calendar and contacts through CalDAV and CardDAV. I've used it exclusively for a while and never had an issue. The formats are pretty standard, so you more or less get your choice of client on any system.

Self-hosting email is like making your own butter.

It’s possible, but most people don’t want to take it on themselves.

Calendar and contacts I’d argue are good candidates to self host. If a config is off and you can’t access them for a day or two, does it matter?

But if email is down, you risk missing something important. If you have a trust issue and everything you send is getting flagged as spam? Hard and slow to fix.

If the problem you’re trying to solve is Flaky and Unethical Big Tech, I would look at finding another, smaller provider and paying for it. Rolling it yourself is a great way to learn entirely too much about mail servers and spending way too much of your free time on it.

I host my email, just not at home but on a rented server.

Here I documented it all https://wiki.gardiol.org/4-e-mail-hosting

It works, its been working for decades now. Never had significant issues....

Email is quite resilient. Servers keep trying to send again and again messages for hours before they give up... So a backup server is not even really required.

I host my email on a hetzner VPS using dovecot+postfix and thus far no issues.

I don't really understand why people are so against it, for me it took an evening to set up and haven't touched its configuration since.

Thank you for posting this as I was not being able to access my work email was some internal issue. I would never have know as I cannot receive an update email!

If incoming emails bounce, normal email servers will see that and retry later. Not that I personally deal with email- I outsource it to Disroot.org :)

I picked mailbox.org, configured it once and havent thought much about it since then, almost 2 years ago now

This post was a great reminder, i should probably reup my subscription soon..

I repeatedly see people saying "don't host your own mailserver". So what are we supposed to do? Just give up and let megacorps own all of our mail? I get it, it goes to those servers anyways. F-that. I'm not giving up yet another service to them. Personally, I have a VPS with racknerd and use docker mail server. Been using it for a couple years now and no issues so far. Just make sure your DKIM/SPF records are good.

I have run my own mail server for 20+ years. I set up everything correctly, including DKIM and DMARC. I have had the same IPs for 10 years. I send <100 emails a month. A few years ago Google started putting most of my emails in spam, and Microsoft started silently deleting them. They will not fix it. I had to start paying for a relay for outgoing messages.

Use migadu.com.

I use Radicale for my calendars and contacts as basically every program, app or device can handle caldav/carddav.

Self-hosting email however is too painful. Not that it isn't easy on principle... but because the basics are simple all the big mail providers have developed a lot of ways to automatically filter out all those quickly put up mail servers mainly used to distribute spam. So having your own mail server while also constantly jumping through all the hoops so your mails are actually received is barely worth it.

I (not EU) self host my email on a vultr VPS. I use the classic dovecot + postfix setup, IMAP for clients, spamd (spamassassin) for extra filtering, etc., etc.. I've got SPF+DKIM+DMARC, a couple different domains, the whole nine yards, just for hobbying that's grown over the years for family members.

All that said, unless you're pretty dang familiar with all those things, I personally would agree with the several people who have just pointed to smaller-time email providers that support custom domain names. It gives you the control to pull it back to your own server later if you want to take on that endeavor (via simply DNS updates), but means you don't have to worry about the complex bits now. I would definitely not recommend hosting it in your own home - not because of availability issues or anything like that (as others mentioned, legitimate email providers retry by policy, so you don't need quad-nine uptime), but because most residential IPs, at least by default, are going to get blocked by most providers for being on a common policy blocklist - that is, your ISP likely tells e.g. spamhaus that your IP is residential and shouldn't be sending email. If you have a business internet plan, that changes. And I could also be wrong for UK; I've just got US knowledge on that particular bit.

If you're familiar with all the bits of SPF, DKIM, and DMARC and want to go for it, a VPS would be my recommendation. Note: many block outbound to port 25 by default to prevent spam bots abusing their IPs, so you'll need to keep that in consideration. Otherwise, one of the email providers mentioned is probably a good bet.