I know there are alternatives like proton mail, tutamail, mailbox.org, etc… But what would be the issue if I create an email using my personal domain, stored in my hosting… maybe encryption? It seems that no-one even consider this option, but I am not sure why…
What would you suggest?
You must log in or register to comment.
I do aliases through simplelogin and have my domain hosted on mxroute.
My domain is my real last name…so I have subdomains like
@myfirst.lastname.comgets pointed to simplelogin for aliases, which then forwards to mxroute.@mywifesfirst.lastname.comgoes to the same simplelogin and points to her Gmail for now.Mxroute is cheap and they’ve got decent web apps but really more made for traditional IMAP clients. And they don’t really do groupware…just email. But that’s really the hardest part, from an admin perspective.
Adminning email is getting to be a sacred art. It’s a lot of work and a constant arms race both against incoming spam, and the spam filters for whoever you are sending to. A whole ton of work for what is really an essential Internet service (when I can’t get into my credit card account because enom is slacking on forwarding mail, it’s a problem…and also why I switched to simplelogin).
For how cheap mxroute is, IMO, absolutely not worth the effort of self-hosting unless it’s actually your day job and you get some sick sadistic pleasure out of doing it on your own time.
The mxroute admin/owner himself also seems like a pretty chill guy. He’s been pretty forward and transparent on Reddit and lowendbox.
Edit to add: important stuff…make sure that you have an email address that you don’t host, to access stuff you need to for the stuff that you do (i.e. DNS, mail hoster, MFA provider, directory service, etc). I use a free proton for that.
Lots of people consider it and choose not to due to the complexity involved. One of many reasons to hate email.
I’m basic. Been using namecheap+privateemail for years and no complaints. Mostly through the clients Thunderbird on desktop of FairMail on mobile.
I only dipped my toes into email hosting at a (terrible) job, the effort and complaints when things didn’t send/receive properly was too much.
That being said, personally I’ve used Gmail and I’m ready to get rid of it. I’ve got a domain I’d like to start using.
What’s everyone’s preference for provider? (I’m avoiding Proton Mail due to the CEO’s recent controversy)
I moved over to fastmail and have been enjoying it, but I’m sure there are plenty of people who will tell me why it was the wrong choice.
I’ve been happy with Fastmail.
The cost isn’t too bad at $5/mo per user.
The wildcard email thing is cool. You can use addresses like whatever@user.domain.tld to hand out to companies on the fly.
I may go back to hosting my own, but I have no complaints with Fastmail at all.
Oh I didn’t even thinking about using wildcard addresses on the fly. I’ve been using the masked email addresses, but that obviously requires forethought.
Depends on your use case. I went with using a custom domain with my iCloud mail account. This lets me accept all messages sent to my custom domain.
So when I create accounts I just use that as the email address like this: lemmy@customDomain.com, bsky@customDomain.com, etc.
They all go to one mailbox but that’s all I need anyway. I’ve been happy with it.
Can you send mail through each email? I had a catch all forwarder before but it l had to reply with a different email, leading to occasional issues.
That’s basically the reason I have a server. I can set up forwarders between my wife and I, and if I need to send mail as kobra@domain.tld, I can just set up the alias and send it.
With apple you’re limited to 5 sending addresses per domain, so no I cannot reply as the from address to most, but that hasn’t been an issue for me at all.
grab a personal domain, setup smtp through proton then have your local mail client archive via imap
email is the only service i would never self-host directly.
But why?
email is incredibly complicated to host yourself successfully due to security, dns requirements. i have a pretty good handle on how to do it, but i havent since ~ 2015 because of the constant upkeep and challenges from the email ecosystem at large.
It’s not THAT bad. Certainly more complicated than before. I don’t think it requires that much upkeep. But this time around it took around 1 month to get it stable. Then I’m coasting for the time being.
But yes, unless you have a specific use case or strong desire, dont.
Email is so important. If you don’t have a stable way to do it and something goes down, you’re SOL and you are responsible
…and as solutions we have many companies who will do it all for you for $5/mo (more or less), the cost of running a basic cloud server. My time and energy in making sure my email is “always good” is worth paying $5/mo to let Fastmail handle the chore. $0.02
But why support the Nazi sympathizer?
Where did you dig this up?
completely debatable if you dig into it, which i have.
Do enlighten us all.
heres a good in-depth writeup of how a single tweet was blown up by people with an agenda, or a general failure to critically think about words:
believe what you want to believe of course.
I can read his tweet. It makes absolutely no sense as his words are the literal opposite of what is really happening right in front of everyone’s eyes. The only explanation is he is sucking up to the party that is dismantling our democracy for his own financial gain.
The other user already shared some article with lots of historical data, both words and actions, that should give a better picture. Anyway, since you decided to ignore all that, then there is also to say that the tweet was a speculation made months ago on a topic where nothing happened yet (or at least, I haven’t read any news about antitrust in the last month). I don’t think anything will happen, but anyway that makes it at most naive.
He stands to gain nothing from this. This is a swizz company.
Yeah,but please don’t use Proton unless you are aware of their drawbacks and marketing lies. (I am not counting the tweet here…)
Or go through my post history,I have explained multiple times here why proton is not an ideal choice.
Infomaniak or mailbox org might be worth a consideration as well
one more reason why self hosted email just isn’t competitive with free/cheap cloud email is the client UX. Gmail is very feature rich while your self hosted email will likely run on RoundCube or SquirrelMail which are extremely barebones.
I bought a domain name and got a web host. I set the index page to be blank and only use the web host for email. It works well. I still have gmail but try to move everything to my own domain email.
Get your own domain. Don’t host your own.
I’ve had the same domain on gmail, proton and now purelymail.
I bought a domain through cloud flare qand use them for dns, I use Fastmail as my mail service.
Fairly simple setup.
Same, but with tuta for service. It works fine.
I didn’t go with tuta or proton because they require a 3rd party plugin and part of my use case is playing https://triplea-game.org/
Does Proton bridge work? I know nothing about that game.
Prooooobably but I was also working with other users who are tech illiterate and setting up even an app password for a mail client is almost a bridge too far, so another plugin/program is asking them a lot unfortunately.
If I need encryption I can encrypt locally and utilize traditional encryption methods.
Wait, is everyone using the same account or something? Why don’t they just use whatever email account they already use?
Proton just sends and accepts regular, unencrypted email, which is totally fine for something like a casual game. Whether you use Proton or something else is irrelevant, all that matters is that your end works.
I’m not the only user of my domain, I have other users.
I don’t want to use Google.
My use case unfortunately meant proton and Tutanoa did not work.
Same, except I bought the domain through namecheap
You can point your domain on any hoster like mailbox.org. There are a lot of benefits at not hosting your own mailserver.
A major downside is that email is not encrypted and Email usually contains very sensitive personal information.
Owning a domain for yourself and having a provider send/receive email on your behalf is a common choice, and it has its own benefits such as being able to migrate to other providers easily. As long as you renew your domain properly, it should be fine. Though do note that only you would use that domain, so anyone would know it was you who sent that email.
Owning a domain for yourself AND handling email sending/receiving can be challenging because there’s a chance your email gets filtered as spam, and the receiver doesn’t get what you sent. It’s also possible that your server goes down, and the email sent to you doesn’t arrive properly, though the email server usually try to send again a number of times before giving up.
If you are confident about setting a server, I can personally recommend Mailcow. As long as you set up SPF, DKIM, DMARC, it should pass most spam filter including Gmail. If you don’t want to deal with the potential headache, getting a provider to send/receive emails for you is a good choice too.
Thanks for the clear explanation!!! 🙌
I managed to get my mails through 95% of servers I’ve tried, and after evaluating the 5% that didn’t accept my mail, I just realized they can suck my man-tits. But maybe those 5% in your case might be recipients you value.
Which 5%
German hoster united internet. The few people I know with those addresses receive a signal message.
I hosted my own for a while. We could never send to gmail though and they are saddly too important.
That worked like a charm for me, but some strange German mall hoster demanded the blood of an unborn unicorn or something like that for it to work.
I’ve read this with concerning frequency, was SPF/DMARC/DKIM all in order? I also have to question if it was a matter of IP reputation, since shared hosting IP ranges are usually pretty thrashed.
I rent mailbox services (for a custom domain) from a local ISP and don’t have problems with deliverability as such.
Those were in order (it was 15 years ago so i don’t recall if all existed but at least some did). Probably ip range but who knows
Yeah, did the whole dance too, and tried multiple providers, but no dice. Some got through to others and some to others, but none was even good enough getting through to most.
This was just a few years ago.
I don’t think these safety/security signatures or protocols or whatever, work, as they are supposed to. If the IP space you get has bad reputation, nothing matters, you’re sol.
I’ve been using my own domain pointed at Inbox.eu. They’re based in the EU and I haven’t had any problems, I pay for 2 users, the price is something like 12€ per user per year, so it’s cheap enough for me.
Do you have alias limit per user per domain?
It’s one domain per mailbox with 5 aliases per mailbox.
Thanks 🙏
Of course :-)
I think the main thing here is to use your own domain, which means you can point it at whatever host you want, whenever you want. Inbox.eu has worked well for me, it’s simple but also cheap and from the EU :-)
Running a mail infrastructure properly is a complex problem. I would not recommend it for most people. There’s a reason most companies outsource it these days.
When you say hosting do you mean yourself or a company?
If a company, I do this with Dreamhost. Email hosting comes with web hosting. I might as well.
It’s been a while since I last looked but I haven’t read anything about whether they read my mail or not. They definitely could though.
Also their email spam filters are not very good.
I’ve done this for years.
One of the benefits is that you can always just set up Gmail to pull from Pop and send with SMTP anytime if you’re not ready to give up Gmail yet and then just turn it off when you are without the need to announce a change in email.
POP…!?
