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?
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.
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.
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
Rackspace gets blacklisted exactly twice a year, like clockwork. So how’s it any worse?
Proton mail
Mail in a box or poste.io
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.
Second vote for MAIB.
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.
I really like Zoho mail. It’s free to setup with your own domain email. I get 5 inboxes for free, which would be enough for a small business. They get 5GB of storage for free. They don’t allow mail clients to be used outside of their own mail clients which is good enough for me unless you pay a subscription. They have both a desktop and mobile app for their mail service.
So far, I’ve used it for personal business and it’s not getting spammed to death. I would love to start a business by providing IT applications, mail setup services and hardware services for existing local businesses.
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?
Modoboa + Thunderbird
Exchange
Alternatively if you use SOGo for groupware/webmail it serves Exchange ActiveSync. No windows server needed!
Not 100% though because CalDAV.
Wouldn’t the cost be prohibitive for selfhosting?
No 🏴☠️, we talk selfhosted, not business.
This is a joke, isn’t it?
Why?
Might not be the answer you are looking for: I would strongly advise against self-hosting your main email, especially if you are thinking about doing it on an IP address from a residential ISP or VPS/cloud provider. Unfortunately those kind of addresses have bad reputations for spam, and you will run in to significant deliverability issues at minimum. Some providers flat out block port 25, which makes sending and receiving unauthenticated email impossible (which is required to operate an “email provider”).
Just need to check it first (port 25) and use providers with good reputation. Many years I got many VPS-based mailservers without any problems with IP block or similar problems. Just need to make initial setup of you server correctly. Reputation services are not banning big ranges of IP addresses because of one stupid-spam server in providers network. But if you can’t deny free relay on your host, it’s just your problem and no problem of your provider.
Proton Mail
It’s currently on yearly black friday offer.
I can’t remember if it was Proton, but i remember reading about some laws being approved where (I think) Proton servers are that would make them comply for disclosure if necessary. Not that it matters much unless you’re doing illegal stuff, i believe i found this while researching the differences between Tuta and Proton.
Agree with Proton Mail, awesome service.
Was thinking about self-hosting my email server, but Proton is just €40/year for me. Even if I value my time at only €20/hour, that means I have just two hours per year to fix issues with my email to break even.
Sure, this is /r/selfhosted, but issues with email are usually not some config changes on my side, which can be easily resolved by rolling back my latest changes from git.
Most of the issues arise from some asshat at email provider X deciding that I’m no longer trusted and blacklisting me. Resolving that issue is more like office politics than tinkering with my setup. Pretty happy if I can live my non-work life without any additional office politics.
Thanks, but no thanks.
There is the middle ground of retrieving your mail from a mail Provider and serving it from a self hosted IMAP. That way you don’t handle in- outgoing smtp but handle it locally.
i’ve been running my own mailserver for about 10 years.
last time i’ve had to look at it was 2y ago (and that was because i was using quite strict blocklists, had 1 not ‘optimally configured’, and that one discontinued service, causing me to be forced to remove it from my list)honestly, once it is running as you need it to, and you have all the regulars set up for your domain (dmarc/dkim/spf) it’s not all that much work.
blacklisting is pretty much a non-issue if you are using a decent provider (i.e. one that does not have 100 spammers on its network) and you are not spamming out yourself.
in 10 years i’ve had 1 or 2 blacklists - both from long before i was using dkim/dmarc/spf and also both due to the ip range (which was fairly straightforward to get my own ip out of the list)
Rather than self host, I switched to Protonmail. I use a custom domain with catchall addresses enabled, so I can have an arbitrary number of email addresses grouped by what service it relates to, along with plenty of filtering and organization rules. So far it’s been nothing but upside, honestly.
I found a lot of good info in r/degoogle and r/privacy
Ended up with MailFence
To “take control of your email” I recommend buying your own domain, but not self-hosting.
Having your own domain will allow you to migrate from one email provider to the other, as you stop being locked in to them with their domain.
If you do not want to use Google or Microsoft, I recommend mailbox.org (used this one for a long time, but had to change, because I wanted to send emails from my aliases). Tutanota is also good choice.
Protonmail is also there as one of the more popular alternatives to Microsoft and Google, but I find them too expensive.
Why am I not recommending self-hosting email on self-hosting reddit? Unlike other services, which you can host at your home (which simplifies a lot of stuff and allow you to avoid subscription), you pretty much need VPS for selfhosting email. If your needs are simple, both mailbox.org and tutanota will cover your email needs for 3 euro per month. You don’t have to think about security, spam, email delivery, building trust with other email providers. It’s their responsibility, not yours. Good luck doing it cheaper on VPS.
I personally use M365 business basic, it’s very reliable but exchange online might not be user friendly. However price to value ratio is just unbeatable.