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
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
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
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.
Unfortunately it’s slowly becoming deprecated (I think)
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.
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)
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?
Exchange
Alternatively if you use SOGo for groupware/webmail it serves Exchange ActiveSync. No windows server needed!
Not 100% though because CalDAV.
This is a joke, isn’t it?
Why?
Wouldn’t the cost be prohibitive for selfhosting?
No 🏴☠️, we talk selfhosted, not business.
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.
Maddy self hosted + Blue mail as client for phone. But be ready to be DMARC compliant :) not difficult just annoying.
Personally I DO self-host… and I have very few problems. I get blacklisted occasionally but it’s not been a huge concern and is usually only the low-priority blacklists… I did have to go through jumping through hoops early on to get my IP accepted but I haven’t had problems in years.
For my mail server these days I use Docker Mailserver. It’s really complete as a server (no frontend though) for setting up a really good IMAP/SMTP server. I have a full docker swarm cluster running here that keeps it VERY reliable. For a frontend on my desktop I use Evolution or Thunderbird (I’m a Linux user).
For a web frontend I have a few I have played with. My current “primary driver” is Snappymail acting as a plugin to my NextCloud instance. However I’ve had good experiences using E-Groupware which is VERY feature complete as an Outlook alternative.
Hope that helps!
https://proton.me/ is the direction I have recently chosen to migrate away from Gmail. They natively support PGP (for the super paranoid) and also has extra perks like VPN and their own version of Drive. Is it truly any more secure than Google? Who really knows, but I am tired of Google scraping thru my emails to fish out directed advertising. It would be one thing if the accounts were unpaid and this was just another way to generate revenue for the service, but with the amount of storage utilized, it was paid for (on multiple accounts). Proton provided a nice feature to import all the Gmail information including contacts and calendar. There was one oddity with importing into the calendar, thinking it had something to do with the way Google ties contact info into calendar (birthdays and such). There are many choices, even rolling your own mail server if you have the time.
Zextras Carbonio [ https://zextras.com/carbonio ] self hosted all the way.
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.