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?
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
Proton mail
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.
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.
Modoboa + Thunderbird
Fastmail, all the way
I bought into Fastmail about 10 years ago (for 7 years) & recently moved to Proton about 5 years ago. Both are excellent privacy-first providers. Gmail is my junk e-mail at this point. Good recommendation. Australia-based business. Fastmail & Proton are my votes. I tried self-hosting for a few years & would agree with below – too many issues with blacklists. This is one you should consider paying for.
I’m getting tired of not having IMAP/SMTP access with Protonmail. How would you recommend Fastmail? Anything negative?
Mailcow is pretty straightforward to setup and has good documentation. No matter what you choose though be prepared to put a decent amount of work into it. I also recommend using an SMTP relay like SendGrid or Mailgun. That way you don’t have to worry about deliverability as much. If you’re not planning on sending a lot of email (<100 emails a day for SendGrid) you can use their free tiers.
Selfhosting is always best. I just cannot trust remote providers with my mails. Only caviat is you usually need a small server with static IP, most providers block emails delivered from ISPs.
Unfortunately it’s slowly becoming deprecated (I think)
Mail in a box or poste.io
Second vote for MAIB.
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.
Exchange
This is a joke, isn’t it?
Why?
Wouldn’t the cost be prohibitive for selfhosting?
No 🏴☠️, we talk selfhosted, not business.
Alternatively if you use SOGo for groupware/webmail it serves Exchange ActiveSync. No windows server needed!
Not 100% though because CalDAV.
5 usd a year vpc… and host your own domain and mailserver
MXroute
this is the way if you have a little patience and aren’t afraid to learn.
I got a 10 year credit due to a server outage that I didn’t even notice. Dude takes his service seriously.
If you self host you are at the behest of your domain registrar.
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.
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.
Postfix or opensmtpd and dovecot probably