I recently started looking into hosting my own email, and the suggestions I got were very encouraging, with a lot of easy solutions paired with some unavoidable gotchas.
It is has become apparent that for me to do this right, I need my own domain name, maybe a VPS or host.
I was about to purchase from Infomaniak, which also had an email solution I liked, but one the prices in euro was throwing me off and two it defeats the purpose of controlling and running my own internet services.
So, I will skip the email hosting and give a try at running my own.
Still, is Infomaniak a good buy? I am going crazy thinking up a good name, and settles on the extension me since it will be a personal thing, but not use my real name since I am going to avoid that shit until I really need to.
Any help would be welcome. Thank you.
UPDATE: I bought a domain name off of Porkbun, which was surprisingly pleasant. I am a sucker for cute guided experiences.
Kind of late to the party but here’s my 2 cents as someone who worked in system administration and emails for over 10 years.
I highly suggest you do not host your own emails. It is not worth it. Not for just you being on it. Even for most sizeable companies, I do not suggest hosting their own emails.
You will be constantly fighting against problems. And when problems arise, unless you have a dedicated team always on it, it will be frustrating and very slow to react.
Emails are kind of critical in their delivery. You don’t want you emails getting lost and you don’t want other people’s email delivery to you lost either. So, it’s important to keep it at a tip-top shape, but you’ll soon find that the world is very much against you from doing so. Because… spammers.
Some problems here are already mentioned by others. Like if your neighbor gets blacklisted because of spammers, you might get blacklisted with them. Suddenly your emails don’t get delivered, but there’s no notification of any kind that you’ve been blocked. Some services send back notification, but vast majority do not. So you have no idea that you’re even getting blocked. There’s countless blacklist services and there’s also individual blacklists. You have to work with all of them. If you’re even on one of them, you can expect significant majority of your emails to be lost to the void. The larger block you buy, the safer you get. Like if you have a shared IP, you’re guaranteed to be fucked. If you have dedicated IP, it’s better, but if multiple neighbors spam, you’re probably getting blocked too. These kind of problems are often seen with cheaper datacenter/ISPs like hetzner, ovh (sub-brands), etc. You will have zero control over this unless you buy a larger block (datacenter) or get your own ARIN IP assignment (at a point where you are now declared as an ISP).
It’s not just blacklists. Though rarer, some places that tend to be more jumpy work on whitelist… They’re generally not going to add you to their whitelist because you’re a nobody.
Email ports are very frequently target of attacks by hackers. Because spamming is highly valuable. A compromised server’s one of most common usage by the attacker is just spamming. Unless you’re pay attention to the amount of emails going out, or set good thresholds, you won’t notice you’re spamming until someone blocks you and now you gotta talk to dozens of different providers on why it happened and how you fixed it and beg them to restore you. Though with good settings and good upkeep of security practices as well as keeping things reasonably up to date, you shouldn’t get hacked. But it’s work!
Spam also goes both ways. You need to setup a spam filter yourself if you’re looking to host. I could go on and on about this as well, but this post is already getting too long.
You do all this for…? It’s not worth it.
If you want your own domain email, just have a third party hosting. Generally biggest players is the safest choice when you want highest email delivery possible. Like google, msft, aws, etc. Bit pricy for an email which you’re used to getting for free, but it’s generally the route that’s safest. And you’ll have some added value with the suites that you might be using anyway.
Yeah, I got a domain name but I will use it to make a fun website. It comes with email, but I may just use a hosting service. I still want to try it out, but I also don’t want to make it my hobby.
Anyways, paying for email is fine, I pay for so much other crap that is not nearly as important as email.