Currently using Tutanota but they’ve just retired my current plan and doubled the price.
I’m looking into hosting my own email. I would like to have encryption but it doesn’t function very well when both sender and receiver need to be on the same platform. In addition none of the information being sent by email is overly sensitive so it’s not a must.
Anyone that’s hosting their own email or has experience/knowledge of Lavabit that would care to chime in I’d be greatly appreciative.
I’ve never tried Lavabit but I run Mail-in-a-Box. It works alright, and is pretty low-maintainence. I tried setting up Postfix and all the related programs on a couple distros and it was a nightmare (and I like to consider myself fairly competent at this sort of thing). Highly recommend just using something like Mail-in-a-Box or Mailcow instead of winging it. Biggest downside (at least for Mail-in-a-Box) is that it requires its own VPS. It is not designed as something you can slap onto an existing machine with other duties.
By VPS I assume you mean I would need to spin up a new Ubuntu VM instead of say run it in docker along with a bunch of other services. Or are you saying I’d need to have a completely separate barebones machine?
The former. The MiaB install is basically running a script on a fresh Ubuntu system, and the instructions stress that it should be a single-purpose machine. Mailcow uses docker though, and might be able to cohabitate in parallel with other docker containers on the same machine. I haven’t tried Mailcow as anything other than an end user though.
Sweet thanks. Only other thing I’ve been concerned about is opening ports into my network. Anything you’ve done to increase the security with this in mind?
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Was planning on hosting from my home server. Will definitely read up on those protocols and the recommendations. Have certificates and domain routed through Cloudflare. ISP is Optus but it’s not a business connection so that could be problematic r.e: spam filters :/
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What about self hosting the IMAP but using for example Amazon ses SMTP? In this way it won’t be on the blacklist
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Thanks for the awesome write up. This is a great workaround for the best of both worlds. You are a gentleman and a scholar.
Also note that many VPS providers block port 25 outbound by default for new customers. You may need to ask support to open it (Linode, DO, Oracle IIRC) or even wait a billing cycle before they’ll open it (Hetzner).
The big email providers also tend to block entire IP ranges, so you might end up on a blacklist if someone else on the same IP block has been spamming.
You’ll also likely need a domain with a “well-established” TLD like .com, net, org etc.
Don’t forget the IPv6 PTR record.
Can only recommend against hosting at home, at least in Germany all ISPs “normal user” IP addresses are on one spam list or another. I now have my mailserver setup in a VPS.
I would recommend Mailcow. It’s docker based. Has an unificial way to instal portainer. And is docker based. And easy to update and there are decent setup tuts on YouTube. I’m using itt myself on my server. And it’s realy easy to install /keep up tot date. Using a shell script
