Selfhosted

E-mail was the first "thing" that got me off of Google (to Proton & then currently Tutanota) but is really the last remaining service I not have self hosted.

I have always read about how difficult and time consuimg it was to run your own mail server, but I felt like I needed to experience it myself. So I purchased another domain and followed the instructions on https://mailinabox.email/.

I am using a small VPS on Hetzner and I have to say the experience has been almost flawless so far. I did need to have my new domain taken off the Domain Block List, but Hetzner gave me a clean IP and defaults to blocking port 25 outbound to prevent spam (simple ticket to open, once account is 30 days old and paid).

I know I'm still early into this journey so far, but it has been really simple and I plan to test this secondary domain for a few months before moving onto it full time.

As an avid self hosted of literally everything else, I can say it has been a lot of fun learning so far!

Just take a look at https://docs.mailcow.email/

This runs from a small box with everything included. It gives you all the tools and config needed for running a secure and feature rich email service. Webmail, some sort of exchange emulation, webcalender on top of a solid postfix/dovecot install with rspamd as spam filter. Everything is configurable via a nice web UI.

After 15y running my own mail service and editing a lot of config files, I use this piece of free and open software and find it very good. All you need is a box somewhere in the internet. Running from a homelab will instantly fail, expect you have a static ip.

I run my own email server using Mailcow. It works well.

However, I do not even attempt to directly send outbound email. It's very difficult to get your server trusted by the major providers, especially Microsoft (who are very picky about email servers). I have an account with MXRoute (which is an email provider) but only use it for outbound relaying. Inbound emails go directly to my server.

For what it's worth, MXRoute is a great provider to consider if you want to move away from the large ones (Google, Microsoft, etc) but don't want to self-host.

I used to. I had a docker-mailserver. It was good. But I moved house and changed ISP. I couldn't set up the reverse DNS on my address, and Gmail was blocking me, so I had to switch to a hosted mail server (namecheap private email).

It's a shame, syncing is noticably slower, and I only get one mailbox, but oh well. Just keep on using GPG.

there are many replies saying similar things, but don't be discouraged from try it out. i host my own with mailinabox on a vm from a cloud provider. no spam issues. the only wildcard was spending a few months getting my ip address off google's spam filters. it is so worth it, i own my own email/calendar/contacts/notes/todo list/ AND website solution. all with mailinabox. completely disconnected from google etc.

I'm using openbsd with dovcot, opensmtpd on a pi. I used mailhardener to get it scoring well. I've had no issues with it getting flagged.

Very interesting. Thanks for the follow up.

I did but I stopped. My server had everything set up (DKIM, DMARC, SPF, Spam filtering) but I gave up after some providers wanted me to jump through hoops to get my mail delivered. Also I never had enough outgoing mail to build some reputation.

I don't. But I do have my domain and use a hosted solution, so I'm kind of independent and own my data.