If AWS is on your radar, might I suggest this guide I came across recently? Notably it makes use of SES for the SMTP, which means that your outbound emails will appear to come from Amazon’s mail servers rather than yours. Outgoing mail can often be the trickiest part of self-hosted mail, as mail from “untrusted servers” will be extremely likely to get flagged as spam.

I used docker-mailserver before and find it less resource intense than MailCow but MailCow and Mailu might be easier to administer for your if you need to have a user GUI that’s permanently running.

However, Stalwart Mail (also on Reddit) is certainly the mailserver that I’d suggest to anyone nowadays since it’s easier, modern tooling, efficient and secure.

Having said that, I’d also suggest not hosting email by your own. I’m happily doing it but issues with reputation and SPAM and are thing.

Advice: don’t

I’ve used iRedMail hosted at home for the last year or so and love it. Even has ActiveSync integration for mobile devices. The key to selfhosting email IMO is to use a SMTP relay service to send outbound mail. I use SMTP2Go and it just works, even free. Everyone’s complaints about blacklists and reputation go away when you use a reliable relay.

I setup iRedMail on a cheap VPS and it works great. I’m not sure about your import process but at least for the mail server it is flawless, and because it uses MySQL as the backend it is super customizable.

the biggest problem with hosting email is that the main way of contacting everyone you need to contact when someone (your provider, client, client’s network admin, partner, vendor, customer, etc) has broken your email service is also email.

I don’t trust anyone to host my email for me, esp. cloud service providers where your data could be ANY…WHERE in the World. I trust ‘me, myself, and I’ sandwiched behind 3-4 firewalls.

I’m also using ‘ciphermail’ for sending/receiving encrypted emails, too for the more ‘sensitive’ material (nothing illegal; just proprietary projects and don’t want Google sniffing around).

It also helps that I ‘own’ (and I use that term very loosely) my IP addresses, so it kinda helps with reliability and veracity issues.

Personally I think poste.io is a great solution. It’s fairly lightweight, easy to set up and has a great interface. I am surprised it’s not mentioned more often.

Thanks for this thread, I have exactly the same use-case, but I have not yet had the time to actually research too deep into it so I am unfortunately still relying on Google.

My partial conclusions:
- I’ve been using the AnonAddy approach for 20 years now with my own domain, like many others have. You do not actually need a full suite for this, just setup your incoming email on your domain with a wildcard, choose a unique email address for everything you sign up for, and that is it. Sidenote: You’ll be amazed at the confused faces you get when “Joe Plumbing Co” requests your email address and you reply "joeplumbing@yourdomain.com".
- For outgoing mail, just use SMTP2GO on the free tier, it works fine and I’ve never had delivery problems. Ignore everyone that talks about IP reputation making it impossible to self-host, while it is true, there are several suppliers with a free tier or a very low cost that take care of this for you. I use it nowadays with Thunderbird because for some reason I was unable to properly use custom aliases with the Google SMTP server.
- For incoming mail, you will probably need a better plan than self-hosting. Your server needs to be up 24/7 or you will end up losing email, so it is probably better to have a cloud-based incoming server that holds it and forwards to your server when it actually becomes available. I’m still investigating this part but it would seem that Cloudflare Mail Routing should work.

I have not yet found what the best solution is to the self-hosted archival search problem, please share your findings!

I use Proxmox Mail Gateway (as a mail gateway) and I can only recommend that. It keeps spam at nearly zero and it is very lightweight and easy to set up. Plus it gives you flexibility where and how to host the actual mail server.

Microsoft has blacklisted most IPs so you’ll most probably need to send them a message to whitelist your mail server or gateway once everything is configured correctly.

If you’re looking for a more than just plain mail check out solutions like Grommunio and Axigen. Some commercial solutions have free versions with minor limitations.

Importing old emails can be done via the client and not directly at the server. There are good solutions for mail archiving and searching (like Mailstore). I’d use that for mails older than two years.

While I like to idea of AnonAddy and I understand your reasons, I just don’t think it is worth the hassle. Eventually your “real” email address will somehow end up in spammers list, but a good spam filter, like the one in Proxmox mail gateway will keep your mailbox clean.

All in all, self hosting a mail server is a bit of work in the beginning, but definitely doable.