A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Running your own email server is easy.
Getting your email accepted by other servers is hard.
Hosting anything publicly requires a significant amount of hardening.
Neither of those two tasks are easy or low maintenance. I self host almost everything and I’ve run my own mail server (with occasional rejection). It’s not worth it for me; I now use a commercial, paid provider for email.
Personally I don't self-host email :
You don't have to use Gmail. There are many, many other options.
I don't self-host email but I don't use my own domain to have control over it. Look into FastMail and a custom domain. That's the happy path.
Given I don't need too much privacy for generic E-Mails (I use my Tuta mail address for that) I'm using purelymail with advanced pricing for ~5€/year. (If I cared more about privacy in emails I'd use Tuta for 3€/month)
I just checked out Posteo and Purelymail but one question lingers... How do I get all my emails out of their servers immediately as I get them and into a centrally accessible server that I can use to search thru my email from any device and accumulate more than just 3gb or 4gb or 15gb or whatever the next service's limitations might be?
The reason I shouldn't serve my own is because we have blackouts during storms so if I was traveling I wouldn't be able to access things that would require email confirmation as a 2nd factor. That's one reason for example.
But yeah I would like to have many devices be able to access the same emails thru a webmail client.
Short answer: IMAP and the mbsync tool (aka "isync"). It can sync between two IMAP accounts or between IMAP and local storage (either/both ways).
If you just want syncing between two IMAP accounts there's also imapsync, which is available both as a program and as an online service run by the guy who maintains the program, priced as "pay what you want", which can migrate your inbox on the fly to another service.
What I've done myself is to run mbsync periodically (made myself a custom Alpine image with cron and mbsync) to bring emails over. Added an IMAP server container on top of the local copy of the emails (tons of options, Dovecot is popular). Added a webmail app behind reverse proxy, talking to the IMAP server on a private docker network (Roundcube). And a Borg Backup job to take an extra backup (incremental, deduplicated and encrypted) of the email archive.
In theory I could also connect the webmail to the SMTP of whatever email provider I'm currently using and be able to use it to also send. I don't do that because I have email clients connected to the provider on both desktop and phone so it's not a requirement, but I could if I wanted to.
This approach lets me periodically trim down the emails stored at the provider to only the most recent. This lets me also use providers that offer small amounts of storage. My recent emails are available instantly through IMAP to the provider. Starting within last 24h and going back forever they're available at the archive webmail.
I can switch email providers at any time as fast as DNS records propagate (because I use @my.own.domains) and as fast as I can update the IMAP/SMTP credentials for my phone/desktop/mbsync.
I haven't played with email extraction to my own server yet (their server is perfectly syncing my devices and has basic searching) but regarding limits: Purelymail's advanced pricing is 4€/year + usage (very fair prices for usage). So you aren't hitting limits. Theres a calculator on their advanced pricing site that lets you input numbers and tells you how much you'd pay.
I prefer to follow the advice from people who actually set up and maintain email servers: “Fucking don’t. It’s not worth it.”
Just get a custom domain and run it through an existing email provider.
I’ve been running my own eMail server for almost a quarter century, and I have no clue what all the fuss is about.
Sure, providers are getting very picky about what domains that they will receive eMails from. But that’s why I have gMail, Yahoo, and Microsoft webmail accounts - so I can train their systems by exchanging emails once a quarter.
And yes, you do have to be running whitelists and blacklists and tarpits and have a good Fail2Ban in place. And good geoIP system if you want to cut out regions that you are unlikely to ever have legitimate mail originate from. But that’s just common sense security.
I hate that it's come to this, but you are right.
It's not that it's too difficult, it's that there are too many things beyond your control due to the central duopoly of Google and Microsoft for email. If you end up in their bad graces it's hard to get out, and they don't care about you, there's no support or someone to talk to to get off the ban list.
Would you care to give some additional context here? I haven't had the itch to host my own e-mail, but what kinds of misfortune do you encounter when you're not in the good graces of Google of Microsoft? And what could land you in that situation?
People repeat and repeat that email is hard but it's a legend. I have been self hosting for years on a residential ip and a random domain and it just works
I self hosted for many years but gave up due to family members complaining about the occasional rejection. You are made of stronger stuff than I am, kudos.
You were ambitious providing it for your family
Self host all the services you want, but don't ever touch sendmail and bind. The most constantly attacked services I've ever had my ass on the line for. I won't even manage them for money anymore.
Sounds like a deal to me.
You don't need your own email server to degoogle your life.
Yes selfhosting it is awesome but it's definitely not the simplest service to do host.
I think what OP means is that you can mix using an external email provider with storing your own email archive + an IMAP server + a webmail app. You can let the provider deal with the IP reputation and all that pain and just use their SMTP and IMAP to send email and pull to your local server, respectively. If you use your own domain you can also switch the provider in 10 minutes by simply changing your DNS records and retain the same address.
The hard part for me when giving up Gmail wasn't the stuff above, it was tracking down all the places I was subscribed as @gmail.com and replacing it with @my.domain addresses. That took about 6 months. The local pull + IMAP + webmail took a weekend to set up.
I like email.
I pay for my own domain. I pay a privacy focused European provider for email and they let me use my own domain. I use an European DNS provider.
So I have email addresses with my own domain and the setup is pretty straightforward and I can use webmail or a desktop|mobile client.
Sorry you're having a bad time. Dockerized Mailu has been working great for me for about a year now. Difficult in the beginning but worth it. Glad I got though it.
Try tutamail or proton if you want to degoogle.
Never self host email. It's way too much of a pain.
Why people keep spreading this misinformation? It's plainly not true and I am the living proof of that.
Been using my email self hosted (on VPs) for decades now, never had serious issues at all. And it's all my family primary addresses
I don't say it's impossible. It's just not worth it 90% of the people, especially for beginners.
I think the general gist is as beginner self hosters we get more and more comfortable too “easily spin up a docker webserver”
At some point we arrive at “what other services can i host” and email is a pretty obvious addition expecting it to at least not be more difficult then running nextcloud.
It may be doable but hell is it not a comparable challenge.
I outsourced my email to a provider.
Works great and only costs me 8€ per month for not having to wrestle IP spamlists, mailserver maintenance and reachability.
What is the problem? I have been self hosting my mail for the last 20+ years and has always worked pretty well.
I rent a VPS for that since you should not use a residential address for email servers.
If you are careful enough to configure it properly I assure you that it works and it's perfectly usable and stable
All my family primary email addresses are managed in that way on my various domains and we never had a single issue
Today it's even easier because there are all in one docker based solutions. But going the hard way is perfectly doable as well.
Here is my experience, on my wiki, if you are interested https://wiki.gardiol.org/doku.php?id=email%3Astart
Be aware that there are no optional steps: everything must be properly installed and setup from DNS entries to dkim/dmarc and certificates. But I promise, maintenance it basically zero after a proper setup. And I think twice in 20 years something broke. And the nice part of that email will just be delayed and delivered after you fix it, nothing gets ever lost
I love email, with all it downfalls, it's still one of the most resilient and solid stuff on the internet.
I promise, maintenance it basically zero after a proper setup.
Well, it was close to zero for me until the last year dovecot update (2.3→2.4) that has broken old configs. I've spent a lot of time fixing them.
I mean I did an email transfer as a multihat guy at a small business and mx records are a bitch. granted more so because there needs to be no loss or delay. might be easier for an individual. but I don't roll my own.
Fair enough - I got it working recently but it was the hardest self-hosting install I've done. No way most people would succeed. Email is 50(?) years of questionable design decisions piled on top of each other so it's become a whole world of weird stuff. Doing email should be it's own tech specialty, like 'devops' or 'db admin' is. There's enough depth to it.
There are a ton of email providers who are not Google, though. e.g. https://proton.me/mail. You don't need to run it on your own hardware.
Doing email should be it's own tech specialty, like 'devops' or 'db admin' is.
It literally is, and has been for quite a while :D Enterprise level email admins make a pretty penny eheheh.
This really saddens me. Email is such a fundamentally good and open protocol. The only reason people don’t like it is because of big tech’s shenanigans.
I run an email service called Port87. I invite you to try it and see if it can convince you that email is actually a great technology, when detached from big tech slop. It’s got some really killer features that make it great for organization and preventing spam. You can also tell it that on certain addresses, it should completely ignore the strict auth requirements it usually has, so it will accept email from your own services without you having to set up all the extra bullshit that’s meant for stuff that matters more.
just get a trustworthy hoster and a good client application. Boom, most of the benefits with none of the headache.
And yeah, E-Mail is, what a decade of expanding scope does to you.
A decade? Email has been around longer than the web. Roughly forty years.
Ok, two decades.
As much as I would like 1981 to only be two decades ago, I’m afraid it was four and a half decades ago.
A generation?
weird to see someonengetting worked up about a service he barely uses and sending little data by default.
Hell is other people. My wife opens her new phone and says! Hey why am I running out of space already! See my gmail says I got no more space!
I tried syncthing and it was great for a while. Now I got an rsync script that I gotta run from time to time.
But wouldn't it be great if The email just came off the bastards and into my own central server instead? That's what I've been trying hard to do. I'm just not hitting the ball on this one. Mailcow, mailserver, stalwart, and a good other bunch. I always just get stuck in some part of the installation or end up with issues sending or receiving. But thinking about it, if I have issues, she's going to have issues. So it's not even worth it.
Have you tried https://mailcow.email/
Its dockerized and preconfigured and cones with tools to manage. I am happy and I never wanted to touch mail.
I moved to https://mxroute.com/ and payed $15 for three years of hosting because they had some promotion.
Yeah, hosting your own email server is pretty tough.
I think something like https://migadu.com/ might be more in the middle of hosting your own server and purely using someone else's frontend.
I rage guit my email server long ago. True, as evidenced in this thread, there are some who successfully run their own email server and that's awesome. I am quite jealous. I too gave up, but I went with a small EU based company. It's no frills, just the basics. I don't send/receive a lot of email, so I don't need all the bells and whistles. If you're de-googling your life, you don't have to specifically run your own email service. I do hear a lot of positives about MailCow tho.