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?
Proton mail
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.
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.
https://mailbox.org/ and https://tuta.com/ are pretty neat providers.
After hosting my own email in the 1990s-2010s, I’ve been cured of that and rather give some dedicated vendor a few bucks a year to take care of all the headaches for me.
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.
Rackspace gets blacklisted exactly twice a year, like clockwork. So how’s it any worse?
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
The problem with selfhosting email, is that unlike other self hosted things, it lives in a distributed system. It has to talk with other mail servers and they have to talk back. The second part is hard due to spam measures…
For just the software side, you have a few options. Mail cow, iRedmail, and Mailinabox are very popular. Linuxbabe has instruction on how to build it from scratch using postfix. (Good to learn, but a LOT of work) But recently I stumbled on Modoboa. It does not need docker, so you can run it alone. It is not split foss with everything good behind a paywall. And it does not install unneeded apps like DNS for no reason. But keep in mind that I have only evaluated it so far and not yet put it in production.
Now for the other needs… To receive mail, you will need a static IP. Theoretically, you can get by with a dynamic DNS, but it will not go well. Your IP will change, and it will still be cached and you will lose email.
To send mail… (This is a lot more) You will need a clean static IP, with a fqdn and ptr record matching. It will need to be clean, and not in a blocked range of IPs. You will also need SPF and DKIM records, and may need dmarc. And you will need to warm up the mail server and maintain it’s cleanliness. Or you can contract out your outbound to other companies like MXroute. If you farm out your outbound, it eliminates most of the complaints above. If you have the skill, you may be able to only route Microsoft and Google destined email, and direct deliver the rest yourself. (I am working on this)
If you know what you’re doing, MailCheap is an option. I picked that a few years ago and MXroute was a very close second choice for me.
Exchange
Alternatively if you use SOGo for groupware/webmail it serves Exchange ActiveSync. No windows server needed!
Not 100% though because CalDAV.
Wouldn’t the cost be prohibitive for selfhosting?
No 🏴☠️, we talk selfhosted, not business.
This is a joke, isn’t it?
Why?
Mail in a box or poste.io
3rd for MIAB. I use Linode. I believe most ISP’s restrict access to mail ports so running at home is probably not possible.
This is a generalization that not useful to keep repeating. Better advice would be check to be sure YOUR ISP allows access to the ports you need.
Second vote for MAIB.
Proton Mail
I can’t remember if it was Proton, but i remember reading about some laws being approved where (I think) Proton servers are that would make them comply for disclosure if necessary. Not that it matters much unless you’re doing illegal stuff, i believe i found this while researching the differences between Tuta and Proton.
It’s currently on yearly black friday offer.
Agree with Proton Mail, awesome service.
Was thinking about self-hosting my email server, but Proton is just €40/year for me. Even if I value my time at only €20/hour, that means I have just two hours per year to fix issues with my email to break even.
Sure, this is /r/selfhosted, but issues with email are usually not some config changes on my side, which can be easily resolved by rolling back my latest changes from git.
Most of the issues arise from some asshat at email provider X deciding that I’m no longer trusted and blacklisting me. Resolving that issue is more like office politics than tinkering with my setup. Pretty happy if I can live my non-work life without any additional office politics.
Thanks, but no thanks.
There is the middle ground of retrieving your mail from a mail Provider and serving it from a self hosted IMAP. That way you don’t handle in- outgoing smtp but handle it locally.
i’ve been running my own mailserver for about 10 years.
last time i’ve had to look at it was 2y ago (and that was because i was using quite strict blocklists, had 1 not ‘optimally configured’, and that one discontinued service, causing me to be forced to remove it from my list)honestly, once it is running as you need it to, and you have all the regulars set up for your domain (dmarc/dkim/spf) it’s not all that much work.
blacklisting is pretty much a non-issue if you are using a decent provider (i.e. one that does not have 100 spammers on its network) and you are not spamming out yourself.
in 10 years i’ve had 1 or 2 blacklists - both from long before i was using dkim/dmarc/spf and also both due to the ip range (which was fairly straightforward to get my own ip out of the list)
Purelymail.com -- based on a similar thread here 6 months ago. They are very affordable, and I have 5 different domains hosted with them. They only bill based on traffic and storage. I liked being able to have multiple domains without any additional charges.
I found a lot of good info in r/degoogle and r/privacy
Ended up with MailFence
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.
To “take control of your email” I recommend buying your own domain, but not self-hosting.
Having your own domain will allow you to migrate from one email provider to the other, as you stop being locked in to them with their domain.
If you do not want to use Google or Microsoft, I recommend mailbox.org (used this one for a long time, but had to change, because I wanted to send emails from my aliases). Tutanota is also good choice.
Protonmail is also there as one of the more popular alternatives to Microsoft and Google, but I find them too expensive.
Why am I not recommending self-hosting email on self-hosting reddit? Unlike other services, which you can host at your home (which simplifies a lot of stuff and allow you to avoid subscription), you pretty much need VPS for selfhosting email. If your needs are simple, both mailbox.org and tutanota will cover your email needs for 3 euro per month. You don’t have to think about security, spam, email delivery, building trust with other email providers. It’s their responsibility, not yours. Good luck doing it cheaper on VPS.
I personally use M365 business basic, it’s very reliable but exchange online might not be user friendly. However price to value ratio is just unbeatable.
Postfix or opensmtpd and dovecot probably
My setup is: Namesilo for domains, Hetzner VPS with autobackup, Mailcow selfhosted. (Few manual updates with backups per year). Just copy paste steps from Obsidian notes. Cloudflare DNS just in case of ddos etc.
I have 3 domains with maybe 6 emails and catch em all. I do not send/receive a lot. Maybe 5-10 emails per day. Most of them are notifications from systems.
All good. I’m happy.