13 ms·

I would really say that "running your own email" is a set of things that can be done independently: - Getting your own domain and using a provider such as fast

by pyrale 5y ago

I would really say that "running your own email" is a set of things that can be done independently: - Getting your own domain and using a provider such as fastmail or proton is a first step that gives you lots of security fom arbitrary. Because you own the doorstep, you can change provider without having to inform all your contacts of the move. You're also more secure from unilateral moves from your provider. -Hosting your own mail server means that you are responsible for the persistence of your mail. It's a nice artisanal thing to do, and you may be satisfied to know that no one is reading your mail. -Sending your mail yourself is the real hard part, because you need a stable IP that is accepted as a legitimate mail sender. Moreover, you need to monitor this property in the long term. Every mail server has their own way to choose who is a legitimate mail sender, and it's an ongoing pain to check that. You're not forced to go all the way, you can simply pick a domain to secure the frontdoor, or you can host your mail server without sending mail by yourself, etc. You can also self-host, and change your mind later without much impact. I personally would incite everyone to do at least #1 for safety reasons, #2 if you want to fiddle with the system to know how it works, and to avoid #3.

koolba 5y ago
There’s a midpoint at #1.5 where you control the domain and rely on an external host, but also have a continuous archive of your historical mails on your own server. Otherwise with a standard IMAP setup, if your provider locks you out, you’re limited to only the most recent N messages on connected devices.
- charwalker 5y ago
  Buy a domain for $20, get a GSuite account with it for $6 a month or similar, then archive all your mail via Outlook or your desktop email app of choice. You also get a lot of other tools and storage space for very low cost which I find useful. It's still using Google but it allows plenty of control and management, and I can take my domain anywhere with minimal stress. It's a decent compromise.
  - bxparks 5y ago
    Just make sure that you use a different domain registrar than Google Domains, and make sure your admin email address is not gmail. Because if Google bans your account, you will be totally screwed.
  - danlugo92 5y ago
    > $6 a month Zoho has a $1/yr plan.
    - indigodaddy 5y ago
      And Yandex has a $0/yr plan (unless they got rid of it and I’m just grandfathered, not sure..)
    - Zopieux 5y ago
      Can't find anything below ~1/month at zoho for just mails; care to share a link?
      - danlugo92 5y ago
        Yeah it's $1 a month, got confused, still a good deal!
    - rattray 5y ago
      Is zoho email any good? I've never heard anything about it.
  - iav 5y ago
    I used to do this but switched to iCloud Beta for custom domain this year. It’s $1/month (free with any paid iCloud plan) and integrates with iPhones/Mac, supports push email for iPhone, and is free of Google spying.
Icathian 5y ago
I've done #1, it didn't occur to me that you could split up #2 and #3. That sounds like a really interesting project. Thanks for the idea!
3np 5y ago
#2 has practical reasons as well, such as security and privacy (yes, other mail servers on the internet can catch your mails in flight; that’s quite different from a mail provider having full retention of your email at any point in time) I’d add another thing: - Hosting your own mail client. You can self-host roundcube/mutt/thunderbird/or even an imap server that just fetches (and possibly deletes) email from the remote server using something like mbsync. This mail client/server doesn’t need to interact with any other mail server apart from the mail provider that receives the incoming email, be that gmail or fastmail. While paid ProtonMail can be used for this, it’s a bit of a hassle with their lack of native imap support.
- judge2020 5y ago
  > other mail servers on the internet can catch your mails in flight This also shouldn't be a problem most of the time if your email server supports TLS; Google currently sees 81% outbound email encryption[0], so you can imagine roughly 4/5ths of email servers support it. 0: https://transparencyreport.google.com/safer-email/overview?hl=en https://transparencyreport.google.com/safer-email/overview?h...
  - 3np 5y ago
    Indeed. It was more of an inb4 of the common reply of “there is 0 privacy gains of self-hosting email since most of the people you’re mailing with will be on one of the big providers anyway”, which is tired and defeatist.
    - Talanes 5y ago
      Tired, defeatist, and giving way too much credit to the big guys. No matter how good they are at assembling a profile on me from indirect data, it's still going to be more effort and likely lower quality than if they had a giant store of data labelled as mine.
dmw_ng 5y ago
> Sending your mail yourself is the real hard part It's possible to punt on this by using SES for outbound, while continuing to handle inbound a different way. Obviously SES doesn't count as fully self-hosted, but it does solve (or at least significantly ameliorate -- zero issues here) the reputation problem
- judge2020 5y ago
  I think that's what they're talking about in terms of 'you don't send your own mail', but it is a good solution and SPF+DKIM means you should have very few issues with deliverability and reputation.
  - blibble 5y ago
    spammers tend to set up SPF/DKIM
    - judge2020 5y ago
      I mean that SES gives you SES IP reputation, and they force you to have a low bounce rate & complaint rate, thus SES specifically is usually not blocked by big providers nor small enterprise networks.
- gruez 5y ago
  >It's possible to punt on this by using SES for outbound How does this work? Do you just sign up for aws, then set your outbound SMTP to whatever SES provides?
  - z0f 5y ago
    Yep, you just configure your outbound SMTP server to be the SES credentials and adjust your SPF/DKIM records.
tzs 5y ago
I'd like to see something to make it easy to address the case where you are doing #1, but your provider does unilaterally kick you off with short notice for some reason. The email equivalent of a bug out bag [1]. This would be something that provides in a single package an SMTP server, an IMAP and POP server, pre-trained spam filtering, and maybe a web server with a web-based email client, and a simple setup program that asks a few basic questions such as your domain name and configures everything on your end and provides help for configuring things elsewhere (such as with DNS, such as telling you what to put in your SPF and DKIM and DMARC records). This is meant as something to handle your mail during the time it takes you to find another provider. It is meant to be something you can quickly install on a VM somewhere, point your MX record at it, get a Let's Encrypt or similar certificate for it, and not be losing mail while you are between providers. It should have a quick start guide that includes details on signing up and getting a Linux VM up at major inexpensive VM hosting places. Amazon Lightsail, Hetzner, and such. It should make minimal assumptions about your Linux environment. Probably it should not use the SMTP, POP, and IMAP servers that are packaged by your Linux distributor. It should use minimal servers that are written specifically for the emergency mail kit. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival_kit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival_kit
- SteveNuts 5y ago
  iredmail does this pretty well https://www.iredmail.org/ https://www.iredmail.org/
  - raphman 5y ago
    Indeed. I set up my personal email server on a Hetzner VPS using iredmail. It just took a couple of hours and everything actually works pretty well with very little maintenance. Even Hotmail/Outlook.com accepts my emails.
- codazoda 5y ago
  I use a domain, registered at Namecheap, and I forward to my gmail account. If gmail “goes away” I simply configure my email to forward elsewhere. If I’m unhappy with Namecheap forwarding, I point my DNS at another forwarding provider. If I’m unhappy with Namecheap, I transfer my domain to another provider. It gives me all the flexibility I need with almost no work or maintenance. There are enough mail providers that I could easily switch to that I don’t need a piece of software. Switching from gmail to yahoo, proton, apple, outlook, or juno is a simple domain adjustment and has me back receiving mail within the TTL period.
spadros 5y ago
> Sending your mail yourself is the real hard part No, having quality spam and fraud filtering, and quality security, that you host yourself, is by far the much harder problem. I would argue that outsourcing your email to Proton or Tutanota is not running your own "artisanal" email server. By the way, even with those email providers, I still have terrible spam and fraud emails getting through filters that I never would have seen with my GMail.
- tjoff 5y ago
  Well, on the flip side unless you constantly check your spam folder (which pretty much completely defeats the purpose of a spam filter) you most definitely have lost important mails thanks to gmail. I just don't see what people see in gmail part from the google brand - which surely isn't a good thing anymore.
  - coffeecat 5y ago
    I'm not here to be a Google apologist, but in the 10 or more years that I've used gmail, I don't think I've ever had an important email go to spam.
    - b112 5y ago
      Incredible. Most people I know? It is almost a daily occurrence. Including if senders are in address books, and "not spam" is clicked when found in the spam folder. Most people I know see legit emails in the spam folder, all the time.
    - avsteele 5y ago
      Google workspace sends yes/no meeting confirmations that you make in workspace, to people within your own organization, to spam unless you specifically make a rule to allow them.
  - lytefm 5y ago
    For me, this was the main reason to move away from MSFT/GMail to Mailbox.org where I could set the Spam filter to as low as they'd allow. So far I've been lucky to rarely receive actual spam, but I've often missed out on important emails too often.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
tarunupaday 5y ago
This is great advise. I do #1 and #2 but not #3. I use sendgrid.com for #3. They have one of the highest (if not the highest) deliverability rates in the world and mails arrive really fast (faster than gmail). As a bonus: I get to see report which of my emails were classified as spam or not opened. Also, first 100 mails per day are free (which has been enough for me so far).
- vultour 5y ago
  You put tracking pixels into private emails? That’s pretty upsetting, luckily I’ve had images disabled for years.
- noizejoy 5y ago
  Using sendgrid would seem to have similar or worse privacy implications to using gmail, outlook and their ilk.
stiray 5y ago
Internet was meant to be decentralized. Lets leave it this way. I am running my server for 15 years and couldn't be more happy with "artisan" infrastructure. I don't want or use webmail (sluggish), I don't want others fingerpoking my emails, I don't want various compulsory registration systems (like requiring my phone number out of """security""" reasons like google), giving others the ability to kill my account and do me a huge amount of work and on the top of that, it breaks the sites registration schemes, I have set up a script that accepts any email with some special structure and each and every registration gets a specially customized mail address (that I can calculate in my head, no configuration needed) that can be resolved back to the registration. Getting spam? I am sick of you, whatever? No issue, just REJECT the whole address. It is used by only one site, like smart people don't reuse passwords, I don't reuse email addresses. And you would be surprised, how many sites sell email addresses to others, and I know it as every one gets its own email address. Rspamd eats the spam just as good as "ai infrastructure" /s Even if you go for 3rd party email infrastructure, registering a domain is a must, so you can switch the provider fast if it gets vampirized. Out of my whole infrastructure (100% self hosted, as said, for 15 years, actually more but not 100%), the email server is the part that needs the least attention. The response to the author would be: nice that large providers have webmails and some other quirks that I don't want or need. Feel free to use them, but I have freedom. postfix. dovecot. rspamd.
- pid-1 5y ago
  > Getting spam? I am sick of you, whatever? No issue, just REJECT the whole address I started using that with Fast mail, they call that Masked address. Best spam filter ever.
- chriscjcj 5y ago
  Honest and non-rhetorical question here: Have any of your customers had an e-mail they've tried to send not arrive because the recipient's system was using a black-hole list that, for some erroneous reason, had you blocked? If so, were you able to successfully communicate with and/or reasonably work through whatever issue got you black-holed? I haven't administered e-mail servers for 20 years, but back when I did, this started to be a problem that eventually became insurmountable. I used to manage a small business oriented ISP. We were multi-homed with a /18 that we used for everything. I had a customer that was a reasonably sized organization that dealt with tourism and conventions for a major city. On one of their websites, (which we hosted with IPs that came out of the same /18 as their mail server,) they had a directory of vendors who were associated with them. ONE of those members had a website that had been hacked/defaced. This got our entire /18 on a blac-khole list. They had an employee that was trying to send e-mail to someone on a system that was using this black-hole server to filter spam. When we explained to them what the problem was, we got glassy-eyed stares back at us and a, "just fix it." I told them that, they would need to remove the link to their partner's site from their website in order to get them AND all of our other customers using numbers inside our /18 de-listed from this particular black-hole. They asked, "We have hundreds of partners who pay for membership in our organization and being listed on our website is one of the benefits. How can we possibly police every one of those websites every day to make sure there's no defacement or serving of any problematic material from any URL in any of those domains?" That's a decent argument in my opinion. And I tried to explain that different black-holes have different policies and no black-hole is demanding that anyone use their system for filtering. I tired contacting the organization that was using that black-hole to explain the situation to them, but they weren't interested in discussing it. As far as they were concerned it was our problem to deal with. This kind of problem happened dozens of times with varying degrees of severity but with increasing regularity and it was one of the primary reasons we quit hosting e-mail and started re-selling another vendor's solution. That was a long time ago, and maybe black-hole lists aren't a thing anymore.
im_down_w_otp 5y ago
FWIW, someone is still reading your email. The owner of the infrastructure of your message recipients. If you've gone through the trouble of hosting your own email to avoid Google harvesting your messages, but you're exchanging emails with someone whose email is hosted by Google, then your emails are still being harvested and/or are harvestable.
- vaylian 5y ago
  Good point. But it is still one person/company less that reads your e-mail, if you and your correspondent used different e-mail providers previously. There are also correspondences where you are only the receiver. For example, when you order things online. Gmail doesn't need to know what you are shopping for.
  - im_down_w_otp 5y ago
    Unfortunately, they can still close the loop on purchase history and ad impressions through indirect, lazy association. It's a very, very impressive edifice that's been created for identifying and tracking pretty much everybody irrespective of their direct, immediate interaction with the entity doing the tracking. I honestly think it's kind of funny that such a potentially insidious system was manifest for something as principally vapid as ad targeting.
    - hackerfromthefu 5y ago
      Yes, quite the trojan horse.
- jraph 5y ago
  True. But at least, you went out of your way to not inflict this to your recipients, should they wish to avoid this harvest. You made your part of trying to avoid this. You did your part to weaken this argument. Someone has to break the vicious circle.
electric_mayhem 5y ago
Your post is super insightful. Option 2 in particular is super appealing. I’ve tried a bunch of pricacy-focused email services and have been let down by one or more aspects of their service. Pretty much all of them managed to handle sending Ronny satisfaction, though. So setting up inbound to run on my own gear and paying a couple bucks a month for others to deal with dkim and and domain keys and all that other crap… that’s brilliant. Thanks for the idea!
patja 5y ago
You can have the best of both worlds with self-hosting received mail and achieving good deliverability by using a service such as Amazon SES. SES will probably cost you less than $10 a year for personal email sending volumes. I use it for my business and it is less than $15/yr. Rarely get a bill for more than $1. They hold you accountable for any abuse/complaints, which is a good thing.
- OJFord 5y ago
  I use it for personal use, would also recommend. It's not 'self-hosting' of course, but that's not what I actually care about personally, more interested in 'running my own' regardless of whether it's physically my hardware or not. (Or rather given everything I've read about self-hosting email, not regardless, this is my preference...)
- vineyardmike 5y ago
  How do you use SES for this? It seems to only allow receipt of email conveniently. Sending seems to require using an api which is not something most people want to do to email others.
  - patja 5y ago
    You can create smtp credentials for use in any email client. The api is optional.
- iggldiggl 5y ago
  For a private mail server operator, Amazon SES is somewhat annoying because if your mail server is down, they're only keeping mails in the delivery queue for something like eight hours or so, which is way too short if you're not a big provider who can commit to round-the-clock support for the mail server.
  - patja 5y ago
    I keep a backup postfix server in a different location from the primary. It all kicked in once about 3 months ago and worked beautifully.
chefandy 5y ago
I think #1 is a super solid idea. I'd love to go beyond that— I'm familiar with the tech and love the satisfaction of a more DIY approach— but other end users preclude my doing so. The author mentions quality in big email service but only passingly mentions what that encompasses. Smooth, responsive, well-worn, ceaselessly preened, and smoothed-over end-user UIs are important. Unfortunately, the open-source alternatives are comparatively rough. (As a long-time developer and more recent designer, I write a lot of open-source code myself. I understand that these are complex and tedious problems to solve. However, without frank critique, "Open-Source Alternatives" will always be "Alternatives.") Every interface I saw needed fundamental design work. My recent research showed 2+ decade old interface layouts w/new features just bolted on, visually complex toolbars, menus, and lists, little editing for views and controls, and comparatively unattractive designs(, which even if it doesn't matter to you, that doesn't invalidate its importance to others.) Even this crowd— people accustomed to configuring complex applications— lament the clunky interfaces. To me, most open-source interfaces are like eating on a diet. Your sense of accomplishment offsets the discomfort... at least for a while. End-users, however, don't have or need, that holistic view of the service. To them, the interface IS the service. DIY/tech accomplishments are abstract and indirect factors, at most. For most, it's like eating on-diet, but someone else loses weight. Attractive alternatives make that unsustainable. So the real hard part isn't technical— it's assembling an email stack where users don't feel deprived for having chosen it. The solution is more collaboration between design and development expertise within the FOSS. If you have a position of authority in any FOSS projects, I implore you to be open-minded when presented with interface design ideas. Happy to talk about productive ways to engage with designers and design feedback.
- Ginden 5y ago
  > most open-source interfaces are like eating on a diet. Because there aren't open-source contributing UX/UI designers. Almost all open source interfaces are quick work done by mostly backend developers.
  - chefandy 5y ago
    Firstly, I am one. I have ten years of full time back-end web dev experience and other types of coding for over a decade before that. I also know others— UX designers generally start in another field and dev work is a pretty common start. Secondly, that few contribute as designers rather than developers is definitely a chicken and egg situation. Designers time and effort is universally seen as less valuable than developers’ and therefore more readily dismissed or minimized. People are worse at taking critique for things they’re not confident in, and as you note, most open source projects are maintained by developers. Ever give a brand new developer a code review? Yeah. That’s about what it’s like critiquing an open source project’s beloved “quirky” interface. I’ve seen eager designers post issues in repos— some with complete wireframes and rationale having done a good amount of work already, asking for specific types of feedback— only for their system to be instantly bikeshedded into oblivion rather than productively discussed. Unsolicited contributions are often viewed as superfluous expenditures of dev time, or even viewed with outright suspicion or hostility. If it’s not submitted in the form of bite-sized PRs ready for production with the understanding that existing devs can veto any changes without any real justification. Going from a haphazardly assembled UI to a properly designed UI requires fundamental change, and that’s a lot of work. Would you contribute code in a project with those competing requirements? Before any of that, any designer interested in open source software has almost certainly made the mistake of griping about the interface for gimp, or git. It’s a good preview for what lies ahead.
unethical_ban 5y ago
Yep! I do #1 despite researching controlling the whole stack. I still like the idea of doing it someday, if only with a development domain. I pay $12 a year for email hosting, $10 a year for the domain. I use name.com and I presume (though I have not tested) that if I needed a human to talk to, I would have much better luck than with Google. I also don't have to worry about a snarky Youtube comment getting me locked out of Youtube, Youtube TV, Gmail, GDrive and everything else.
jpalomaki 5y ago
Security of your own domain depends a great deal on the security of your domain registar and dns provider. If you are going this route for security purposes make sure they have proper policies and are not a susceptible to social engineering. At least Cloudflare is offering such thing, but it’s enterprise option [1]. I would assume many others have similar offerings as well. [1] https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/products/registrar/custom-domain-protection/ https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/products/registrar/custom-d...
ip26 5y ago
I was determined to make #3 work for years. But despite a golden reputation for my IP, perfect dkim, dmarc, dns, and everything else, plus exclusively personal mail (no bulk mail ever) I could never get out of the spam box at several major providers. Never could figure it out, even with all the tools. Finally gave up. I have come to suspect new MX servers are spam-holed by default until enough people click “Not Spam”, which is an absurd hurdle for a single user hobby server.
- lytefm 5y ago
  > I have come to suspect new MX servers are spam-holed by default until enough people click “Not Spam”, which is an absurd hurdle for a single user hobby server. Yes, a fresh (or: previously sending spam) IP requires some warmup time until providers like GMail will let you anywhere near the inbox. And if you're not sending out a high enough volume of emails, no chance.
  - ip26 5y ago
    I had the IP for probably five to seven years- but my outbound mail volume was less than ten emails a week. Which, of course, was tough to increase when delivery was poor - chicken and egg. I monitored all the blacklists, filed ownership attestations with receiving domains, the whole nine yards. It’s sad that a microscopic MX server can’t be default trust instead of default spam for the first two messages a week. (I want to repeat, this was a single user exclusively personal domain. Writing to a friend, to grandma, to a colleague) I was probably in a bad ASN, but at that level trying to find a good block you’re just rolling dice. I wasn’t willing to play anymore.
nimbius 5y ago
you could argue dmarc, dkim, and SPF were all invented as barriers to entry for small mail servers as the majority of internet SPF is permissive and the majority of DKIM is misconfigured. imo, senderbase and other reputation/policy proprietary shit-lists used by anyone with a Symantec or Cisco email product only served to convert the unwashed to a corporate license as most of these mechanical turks just paid the same spammers by night to show up in a delhi office complex day job to identify their own campaigns. DMARC and DKIM/SPF just wrapped email in a mandatory layer of arbitrary complexity to "solve" a problem that RBL's had largely managed to tackle as an independent entity. that they exist in part to force the hand of small companies and users to simply submit to a big player for their email is something i have long considered. DISCLOSURE: I proudly run my own email server.
- evandwight 5y ago
  How hard is it to actually get mail delivered? I have the dumb idea of trying to make SMTP as cheap as http. Make spam expensive using proof of stake. I find it frustrating I have to pay Amazon to send text for me. I was going to setup my own SMTP server but it seemed like too much work.
  - hardwaresofton 5y ago
    Check out the following pieces of software — it’s never been easier! Maddy (https://maddy.email/ https://maddy.email/) Postal (https://docs.postalserver.io/ https://docs.postalserver.io/) Chasquid (https://blitiri.com.ar/p/chasquid/ https://blitiri.com.ar/p/chasquid/)
  - toomanybeersies 5y ago
    > Make spam expensive using proof of stake That's already a thing. Hashcash [1], the PoW algorithm underpinning Bitcoin, was originally conceived as a method to prevent email spam. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
- invalidator 5y ago
  SPF/DKIM aren't meant to solve spam directly. They are aimed at sender forgery. The real benefit of SPF is for outgoing mail. People no longer forge my domains. It stops backscatter. It has almost eliminated the mistaken spam reports to my ISP by people who don't understand mail headers.
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
Qualifier to add to #3. Sending mail to other recipients who are running their own mail server (for themselves not for others) is not "real hard".
- pyrale 5y ago
  Unfortunately, most outbound mail I send these days end up at Google or MS.
_0ffh 5y ago
Yeah, I've gone with the compromise of my own domain and a rented managed server for the last twenty years or so. Works well enough for me. I like to be able to give different email addresses every time I need to register somewhere. Keeps my personal address free of spam.
BbzzbB 5y ago
Might be a silly question, I own a domain that is my first initial + last name dot dev for my portfolio. What's a decent, or usual, prefix to use with such a domain as a personal email for job applications? Bonus point if it is English-French bilingual. contact@ sounds off, like I'm a corporation. email@ or mail@ I kind of like, but I'm afraid it sounds "confusing" (is that in my head?). application@ or job@ is not bad, but a bit specific and not one I could use all around.
- ListeningPie 5y ago
  I use me@my-domain.com, and I am playing with the idea of different versions per language, Ja, watashi, moi, mig, and so on.
- neop1x 5y ago
  hello@name.com
- bennyp101 5y ago
  I always give out 'hello@' or 'hi@' on for general contacting
- pyrale 5y ago
  hello@ is pretty popular. But when I give the mail directly to a given company, I use companyname@mydomain.com. That lets me track how I'm contacted, and sometimes it starts interesting conversations.
vineyardmike 5y ago
Great write up! I’ve long been interested in self hosting, but constantly tweaking and never got #3 stable. After iCloud made it easy to do #1, I pushed my parents into using it and gave them my domain (@lastname). Now I just share it too, since it’s just too easy. I encourage everyone who wants to change to something they control, or uses a paid iCloud tier to set up their own vanity domain for iCloud. It’s so easy and lets you own the identity, which is a critical part and portable. Not trying to shill anything, but it took 10 minutes and is offered by apple, so every not tech-savy person has heard of and trusts them, so it’s easier to convince others.

by pyrale 5y ago

koolba 5y ago

There’s a midpoint at #1.5 where you control the domain and rely on an external host, but also have a continuous archive of your historical mails on your own server. Otherwise with a standard IMAP setup, if your provider locks you out, you’re limited to only the most recent N messages on connected devices.

charwalker 5y ago
Buy a domain for $20, get a GSuite account with it for $6 a month or similar, then archive all your mail via Outlook or your desktop email app of choice. You also get a lot of other tools and storage space for very low cost which I find useful. It's still using Google but it allows plenty of control and management, and I can take my domain anywhere with minimal stress. It's a decent compromise.
- bxparks 5y ago
  Just make sure that you use a different domain registrar than Google Domains, and make sure your admin email address is not gmail. Because if Google bans your account, you will be totally screwed.
- danlugo92 5y ago
  > $6 a month Zoho has a $1/yr plan.
  - indigodaddy 5y ago
    And Yandex has a $0/yr plan (unless they got rid of it and I’m just grandfathered, not sure..)
  - Zopieux 5y ago
    Can't find anything below ~1/month at zoho for just mails; care to share a link?
    - danlugo92 5y ago
      Yeah it's $1 a month, got confused, still a good deal!
  - rattray 5y ago
    Is zoho email any good? I've never heard anything about it.
- iav 5y ago
  I used to do this but switched to iCloud Beta for custom domain this year. It’s $1/month (free with any paid iCloud plan) and integrates with iPhones/Mac, supports push email for iPhone, and is free of Google spying.

Icathian 5y ago

I've done #1, it didn't occur to me that you could split up #2 and #3. That sounds like a really interesting project. Thanks for the idea!

3np 5y ago

#2 has practical reasons as well, such as security and privacy (yes, other mail servers on the internet can catch your mails in flight; that’s quite different from a mail provider having full retention of your email at any point in time) I’d add another thing: - Hosting your own mail client. You can self-host roundcube/mutt/thunderbird/or even an imap server that just fetches (and possibly deletes) email from the remote server using something like mbsync. This mail client/server doesn’t need to interact with any other mail server apart from the mail provider that receives the incoming email, be that gmail or fastmail. While paid ProtonMail can be used for this, it’s a bit of a hassle with their lack of native imap support.

judge2020 5y ago
> other mail servers on the internet can catch your mails in flight This also shouldn't be a problem most of the time if your email server supports TLS; Google currently sees 81% outbound email encryption[0], so you can imagine roughly 4/5ths of email servers support it. 0: https://transparencyreport.google.com/safer-email/overview?hl=en https://transparencyreport.google.com/safer-email/overview?h...
- 3np 5y ago
  Indeed. It was more of an inb4 of the common reply of “there is 0 privacy gains of self-hosting email since most of the people you’re mailing with will be on one of the big providers anyway”, which is tired and defeatist.
  - Talanes 5y ago
    Tired, defeatist, and giving way too much credit to the big guys. No matter how good they are at assembling a profile on me from indirect data, it's still going to be more effort and likely lower quality than if they had a giant store of data labelled as mine.

dmw_ng 5y ago

> Sending your mail yourself is the real hard part It's possible to punt on this by using SES for outbound, while continuing to handle inbound a different way. Obviously SES doesn't count as fully self-hosted, but it does solve (or at least significantly ameliorate -- zero issues here) the reputation problem

judge2020 5y ago
I think that's what they're talking about in terms of 'you don't send your own mail', but it is a good solution and SPF+DKIM means you should have very few issues with deliverability and reputation.
- blibble 5y ago
  spammers tend to set up SPF/DKIM
  - judge2020 5y ago
    I mean that SES gives you SES IP reputation, and they force you to have a low bounce rate & complaint rate, thus SES specifically is usually not blocked by big providers nor small enterprise networks.
gruez 5y ago
>It's possible to punt on this by using SES for outbound How does this work? Do you just sign up for aws, then set your outbound SMTP to whatever SES provides?
- z0f 5y ago
  Yep, you just configure your outbound SMTP server to be the SES credentials and adjust your SPF/DKIM records.

tzs 5y ago

I'd like to see something to make it easy to address the case where you are doing #1, but your provider does unilaterally kick you off with short notice for some reason. The email equivalent of a bug out bag [1]. This would be something that provides in a single package an SMTP server, an IMAP and POP server, pre-trained spam filtering, and maybe a web server with a web-based email client, and a simple setup program that asks a few basic questions such as your domain name and configures everything on your end and provides help for configuring things elsewhere (such as with DNS, such as telling you what to put in your SPF and DKIM and DMARC records). This is meant as something to handle your mail during the time it takes you to find another provider. It is meant to be something you can quickly install on a VM somewhere, point your MX record at it, get a Let's Encrypt or similar certificate for it, and not be losing mail while you are between providers. It should have a quick start guide that includes details on signing up and getting a Linux VM up at major inexpensive VM hosting places. Amazon Lightsail, Hetzner, and such. It should make minimal assumptions about your Linux environment. Probably it should not use the SMTP, POP, and IMAP servers that are packaged by your Linux distributor. It should use minimal servers that are written specifically for the emergency mail kit. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival_kit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival_kit

SteveNuts 5y ago
iredmail does this pretty well https://www.iredmail.org/ https://www.iredmail.org/
- raphman 5y ago
  Indeed. I set up my personal email server on a Hetzner VPS using iredmail. It just took a couple of hours and everything actually works pretty well with very little maintenance. Even Hotmail/Outlook.com accepts my emails.
codazoda 5y ago
I use a domain, registered at Namecheap, and I forward to my gmail account. If gmail “goes away” I simply configure my email to forward elsewhere. If I’m unhappy with Namecheap forwarding, I point my DNS at another forwarding provider. If I’m unhappy with Namecheap, I transfer my domain to another provider. It gives me all the flexibility I need with almost no work or maintenance. There are enough mail providers that I could easily switch to that I don’t need a piece of software. Switching from gmail to yahoo, proton, apple, outlook, or juno is a simple domain adjustment and has me back receiving mail within the TTL period.

spadros 5y ago

> Sending your mail yourself is the real hard part No, having quality spam and fraud filtering, and quality security, that you host yourself, is by far the much harder problem. I would argue that outsourcing your email to Proton or Tutanota is not running your own "artisanal" email server. By the way, even with those email providers, I still have terrible spam and fraud emails getting through filters that I never would have seen with my GMail.

tjoff 5y ago
Well, on the flip side unless you constantly check your spam folder (which pretty much completely defeats the purpose of a spam filter) you most definitely have lost important mails thanks to gmail. I just don't see what people see in gmail part from the google brand - which surely isn't a good thing anymore.
- coffeecat 5y ago
  I'm not here to be a Google apologist, but in the 10 or more years that I've used gmail, I don't think I've ever had an important email go to spam.
  - b112 5y ago
    Incredible. Most people I know? It is almost a daily occurrence. Including if senders are in address books, and "not spam" is clicked when found in the spam folder. Most people I know see legit emails in the spam folder, all the time.
  - avsteele 5y ago
    Google workspace sends yes/no meeting confirmations that you make in workspace, to people within your own organization, to spam unless you specifically make a rule to allow them.
- lytefm 5y ago
  For me, this was the main reason to move away from MSFT/GMail to Mailbox.org where I could set the Spam filter to as low as they'd allow. So far I've been lucky to rarely receive actual spam, but I've often missed out on important emails too often.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

tarunupaday 5y ago

This is great advise. I do #1 and #2 but not #3. I use sendgrid.com for #3. They have one of the highest (if not the highest) deliverability rates in the world and mails arrive really fast (faster than gmail). As a bonus: I get to see report which of my emails were classified as spam or not opened. Also, first 100 mails per day are free (which has been enough for me so far).

vultour 5y ago
You put tracking pixels into private emails? That’s pretty upsetting, luckily I’ve had images disabled for years.
noizejoy 5y ago
Using sendgrid would seem to have similar or worse privacy implications to using gmail, outlook and their ilk.

stiray 5y ago

Internet was meant to be decentralized. Lets leave it this way. I am running my server for 15 years and couldn't be more happy with "artisan" infrastructure. I don't want or use webmail (sluggish), I don't want others fingerpoking my emails, I don't want various compulsory registration systems (like requiring my phone number out of """security""" reasons like google), giving others the ability to kill my account and do me a huge amount of work and on the top of that, it breaks the sites registration schemes, I have set up a script that accepts any email with some special structure and each and every registration gets a specially customized mail address (that I can calculate in my head, no configuration needed) that can be resolved back to the registration. Getting spam? I am sick of you, whatever? No issue, just REJECT the whole address. It is used by only one site, like smart people don't reuse passwords, I don't reuse email addresses. And you would be surprised, how many sites sell email addresses to others, and I know it as every one gets its own email address. Rspamd eats the spam just as good as "ai infrastructure" /s Even if you go for 3rd party email infrastructure, registering a domain is a must, so you can switch the provider fast if it gets vampirized. Out of my whole infrastructure (100% self hosted, as said, for 15 years, actually more but not 100%), the email server is the part that needs the least attention. The response to the author would be: nice that large providers have webmails and some other quirks that I don't want or need. Feel free to use them, but I have freedom. postfix. dovecot. rspamd.

pid-1 5y ago
> Getting spam? I am sick of you, whatever? No issue, just REJECT the whole address I started using that with Fast mail, they call that Masked address. Best spam filter ever.
chriscjcj 5y ago
Honest and non-rhetorical question here: Have any of your customers had an e-mail they've tried to send not arrive because the recipient's system was using a black-hole list that, for some erroneous reason, had you blocked? If so, were you able to successfully communicate with and/or reasonably work through whatever issue got you black-holed? I haven't administered e-mail servers for 20 years, but back when I did, this started to be a problem that eventually became insurmountable. I used to manage a small business oriented ISP. We were multi-homed with a /18 that we used for everything. I had a customer that was a reasonably sized organization that dealt with tourism and conventions for a major city. On one of their websites, (which we hosted with IPs that came out of the same /18 as their mail server,) they had a directory of vendors who were associated with them. ONE of those members had a website that had been hacked/defaced. This got our entire /18 on a blac-khole list. They had an employee that was trying to send e-mail to someone on a system that was using this black-hole server to filter spam. When we explained to them what the problem was, we got glassy-eyed stares back at us and a, "just fix it." I told them that, they would need to remove the link to their partner's site from their website in order to get them AND all of our other customers using numbers inside our /18 de-listed from this particular black-hole. They asked, "We have hundreds of partners who pay for membership in our organization and being listed on our website is one of the benefits. How can we possibly police every one of those websites every day to make sure there's no defacement or serving of any problematic material from any URL in any of those domains?" That's a decent argument in my opinion. And I tried to explain that different black-holes have different policies and no black-hole is demanding that anyone use their system for filtering. I tired contacting the organization that was using that black-hole to explain the situation to them, but they weren't interested in discussing it. As far as they were concerned it was our problem to deal with. This kind of problem happened dozens of times with varying degrees of severity but with increasing regularity and it was one of the primary reasons we quit hosting e-mail and started re-selling another vendor's solution. That was a long time ago, and maybe black-hole lists aren't a thing anymore.

im_down_w_otp 5y ago

FWIW, someone is still reading your email. The owner of the infrastructure of your message recipients. If you've gone through the trouble of hosting your own email to avoid Google harvesting your messages, but you're exchanging emails with someone whose email is hosted by Google, then your emails are still being harvested and/or are harvestable.

vaylian 5y ago
Good point. But it is still one person/company less that reads your e-mail, if you and your correspondent used different e-mail providers previously. There are also correspondences where you are only the receiver. For example, when you order things online. Gmail doesn't need to know what you are shopping for.
- im_down_w_otp 5y ago
  Unfortunately, they can still close the loop on purchase history and ad impressions through indirect, lazy association. It's a very, very impressive edifice that's been created for identifying and tracking pretty much everybody irrespective of their direct, immediate interaction with the entity doing the tracking. I honestly think it's kind of funny that such a potentially insidious system was manifest for something as principally vapid as ad targeting.
  - hackerfromthefu 5y ago
    Yes, quite the trojan horse.
jraph 5y ago
True. But at least, you went out of your way to not inflict this to your recipients, should they wish to avoid this harvest. You made your part of trying to avoid this. You did your part to weaken this argument. Someone has to break the vicious circle.

electric_mayhem 5y ago

Your post is super insightful. Option 2 in particular is super appealing. I’ve tried a bunch of pricacy-focused email services and have been let down by one or more aspects of their service. Pretty much all of them managed to handle sending Ronny satisfaction, though. So setting up inbound to run on my own gear and paying a couple bucks a month for others to deal with dkim and and domain keys and all that other crap… that’s brilliant. Thanks for the idea!

patja 5y ago

You can have the best of both worlds with self-hosting received mail and achieving good deliverability by using a service such as Amazon SES. SES will probably cost you less than $10 a year for personal email sending volumes. I use it for my business and it is less than $15/yr. Rarely get a bill for more than $1. They hold you accountable for any abuse/complaints, which is a good thing.

OJFord 5y ago
I use it for personal use, would also recommend. It's not 'self-hosting' of course, but that's not what I actually care about personally, more interested in 'running my own' regardless of whether it's physically my hardware or not. (Or rather given everything I've read about self-hosting email, not regardless, this is my preference...)
vineyardmike 5y ago
How do you use SES for this? It seems to only allow receipt of email conveniently. Sending seems to require using an api which is not something most people want to do to email others.
- patja 5y ago
  You can create smtp credentials for use in any email client. The api is optional.
iggldiggl 5y ago
For a private mail server operator, Amazon SES is somewhat annoying because if your mail server is down, they're only keeping mails in the delivery queue for something like eight hours or so, which is way too short if you're not a big provider who can commit to round-the-clock support for the mail server.
- patja 5y ago
  I keep a backup postfix server in a different location from the primary. It all kicked in once about 3 months ago and worked beautifully.

chefandy 5y ago

I think #1 is a super solid idea. I'd love to go beyond that— I'm familiar with the tech and love the satisfaction of a more DIY approach— but other end users preclude my doing so. The author mentions quality in big email service but only passingly mentions what that encompasses. Smooth, responsive, well-worn, ceaselessly preened, and smoothed-over end-user UIs are important. Unfortunately, the open-source alternatives are comparatively rough. (As a long-time developer and more recent designer, I write a lot of open-source code myself. I understand that these are complex and tedious problems to solve. However, without frank critique, "Open-Source Alternatives" will always be "Alternatives.") Every interface I saw needed fundamental design work. My recent research showed 2+ decade old interface layouts w/new features just bolted on, visually complex toolbars, menus, and lists, little editing for views and controls, and comparatively unattractive designs(, which even if it doesn't matter to you, that doesn't invalidate its importance to others.) Even this crowd— people accustomed to configuring complex applications— lament the clunky interfaces. To me, most open-source interfaces are like eating on a diet. Your sense of accomplishment offsets the discomfort... at least for a while. End-users, however, don't have or need, that holistic view of the service. To them, the interface IS the service. DIY/tech accomplishments are abstract and indirect factors, at most. For most, it's like eating on-diet, but someone else loses weight. Attractive alternatives make that unsustainable. So the real hard part isn't technical— it's assembling an email stack where users don't feel deprived for having chosen it. The solution is more collaboration between design and development expertise within the FOSS. If you have a position of authority in any FOSS projects, I implore you to be open-minded when presented with interface design ideas. Happy to talk about productive ways to engage with designers and design feedback.

Ginden 5y ago
> most open-source interfaces are like eating on a diet. Because there aren't open-source contributing UX/UI designers. Almost all open source interfaces are quick work done by mostly backend developers.
- chefandy 5y ago
  Firstly, I am one. I have ten years of full time back-end web dev experience and other types of coding for over a decade before that. I also know others— UX designers generally start in another field and dev work is a pretty common start. Secondly, that few contribute as designers rather than developers is definitely a chicken and egg situation. Designers time and effort is universally seen as less valuable than developers’ and therefore more readily dismissed or minimized. People are worse at taking critique for things they’re not confident in, and as you note, most open source projects are maintained by developers. Ever give a brand new developer a code review? Yeah. That’s about what it’s like critiquing an open source project’s beloved “quirky” interface. I’ve seen eager designers post issues in repos— some with complete wireframes and rationale having done a good amount of work already, asking for specific types of feedback— only for their system to be instantly bikeshedded into oblivion rather than productively discussed. Unsolicited contributions are often viewed as superfluous expenditures of dev time, or even viewed with outright suspicion or hostility. If it’s not submitted in the form of bite-sized PRs ready for production with the understanding that existing devs can veto any changes without any real justification. Going from a haphazardly assembled UI to a properly designed UI requires fundamental change, and that’s a lot of work. Would you contribute code in a project with those competing requirements? Before any of that, any designer interested in open source software has almost certainly made the mistake of griping about the interface for gimp, or git. It’s a good preview for what lies ahead.

unethical_ban 5y ago

Yep! I do #1 despite researching controlling the whole stack. I still like the idea of doing it someday, if only with a development domain. I pay $12 a year for email hosting, $10 a year for the domain. I use name.com and I presume (though I have not tested) that if I needed a human to talk to, I would have much better luck than with Google. I also don't have to worry about a snarky Youtube comment getting me locked out of Youtube, Youtube TV, Gmail, GDrive and everything else.

jpalomaki 5y ago

Security of your own domain depends a great deal on the security of your domain registar and dns provider. If you are going this route for security purposes make sure they have proper policies and are not a susceptible to social engineering. At least Cloudflare is offering such thing, but it’s enterprise option [1]. I would assume many others have similar offerings as well. [1] https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/products/registrar/custom-domain-protection/ https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/products/registrar/custom-d...

ip26 5y ago

I was determined to make #3 work for years. But despite a golden reputation for my IP, perfect dkim, dmarc, dns, and everything else, plus exclusively personal mail (no bulk mail ever) I could never get out of the spam box at several major providers. Never could figure it out, even with all the tools. Finally gave up. I have come to suspect new MX servers are spam-holed by default until enough people click “Not Spam”, which is an absurd hurdle for a single user hobby server.

lytefm 5y ago
> I have come to suspect new MX servers are spam-holed by default until enough people click “Not Spam”, which is an absurd hurdle for a single user hobby server. Yes, a fresh (or: previously sending spam) IP requires some warmup time until providers like GMail will let you anywhere near the inbox. And if you're not sending out a high enough volume of emails, no chance.
- ip26 5y ago
  I had the IP for probably five to seven years- but my outbound mail volume was less than ten emails a week. Which, of course, was tough to increase when delivery was poor - chicken and egg. I monitored all the blacklists, filed ownership attestations with receiving domains, the whole nine yards. It’s sad that a microscopic MX server can’t be default trust instead of default spam for the first two messages a week. (I want to repeat, this was a single user exclusively personal domain. Writing to a friend, to grandma, to a colleague) I was probably in a bad ASN, but at that level trying to find a good block you’re just rolling dice. I wasn’t willing to play anymore.

nimbius 5y ago

you could argue dmarc, dkim, and SPF were all invented as barriers to entry for small mail servers as the majority of internet SPF is permissive and the majority of DKIM is misconfigured. imo, senderbase and other reputation/policy proprietary shit-lists used by anyone with a Symantec or Cisco email product only served to convert the unwashed to a corporate license as most of these mechanical turks just paid the same spammers by night to show up in a delhi office complex day job to identify their own campaigns. DMARC and DKIM/SPF just wrapped email in a mandatory layer of arbitrary complexity to "solve" a problem that RBL's had largely managed to tackle as an independent entity. that they exist in part to force the hand of small companies and users to simply submit to a big player for their email is something i have long considered. DISCLOSURE: I proudly run my own email server.

evandwight 5y ago
How hard is it to actually get mail delivered? I have the dumb idea of trying to make SMTP as cheap as http. Make spam expensive using proof of stake. I find it frustrating I have to pay Amazon to send text for me. I was going to setup my own SMTP server but it seemed like too much work.
- hardwaresofton 5y ago
  Check out the following pieces of software — it’s never been easier! Maddy (https://maddy.email/ https://maddy.email/) Postal (https://docs.postalserver.io/ https://docs.postalserver.io/) Chasquid (https://blitiri.com.ar/p/chasquid/ https://blitiri.com.ar/p/chasquid/)
- toomanybeersies 5y ago
  > Make spam expensive using proof of stake That's already a thing. Hashcash [1], the PoW algorithm underpinning Bitcoin, was originally conceived as a method to prevent email spam. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
invalidator 5y ago
SPF/DKIM aren't meant to solve spam directly. They are aimed at sender forgery. The real benefit of SPF is for outgoing mail. People no longer forge my domains. It stops backscatter. It has almost eliminated the mistaken spam reports to my ISP by people who don't understand mail headers.

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

Qualifier to add to #3. Sending mail to other recipients who are running their own mail server (for themselves not for others) is not "real hard".

pyrale 5y ago
Unfortunately, most outbound mail I send these days end up at Google or MS.

_0ffh 5y ago

Yeah, I've gone with the compromise of my own domain and a rented managed server for the last twenty years or so. Works well enough for me. I like to be able to give different email addresses every time I need to register somewhere. Keeps my personal address free of spam.

BbzzbB 5y ago

Might be a silly question, I own a domain that is my first initial + last name dot dev for my portfolio. What's a decent, or usual, prefix to use with such a domain as a personal email for job applications? Bonus point if it is English-French bilingual. contact@ sounds off, like I'm a corporation. email@ or mail@ I kind of like, but I'm afraid it sounds "confusing" (is that in my head?). application@ or job@ is not bad, but a bit specific and not one I could use all around.

ListeningPie 5y ago
I use me@my-domain.com, and I am playing with the idea of different versions per language, Ja, watashi, moi, mig, and so on.
neop1x 5y ago
hello@name.com
bennyp101 5y ago
I always give out 'hello@' or 'hi@' on for general contacting
pyrale 5y ago
hello@ is pretty popular. But when I give the mail directly to a given company, I use companyname@mydomain.com. That lets me track how I'm contacted, and sometimes it starts interesting conversations.

vineyardmike 5y ago

Great write up! I’ve long been interested in self hosting, but constantly tweaking and never got #3 stable. After iCloud made it easy to do #1, I pushed my parents into using it and gave them my domain (@lastname). Now I just share it too, since it’s just too easy. I encourage everyone who wants to change to something they control, or uses a paid iCloud tier to set up their own vanity domain for iCloud. It’s so easy and lets you own the identity, which is a critical part and portable. Not trying to shill anything, but it took 10 minutes and is offered by apple, so every not tech-savy person has heard of and trusts them, so it’s easier to convince others.