I’m curious about this too.
A lot of self-hosted FOSS people draw the line at hosting their own mail servers. Even if Mozilla created a new domain hosting server for handling, the big three could still reject the traffic like they do for people hosting outside the three now, under the guise of spam filtering.
I’d be ecstatic if they did something here, but I’m not really clear on what a solution would look like. On top of them spreading thin as you mentioned
*edited ‘domain’ service to ‘hosting’ service
I have my own domain (even if hosted on a relatively small provider) and I don’t have that much of an issue tbh?
I edited the comment, I really meant hosting server, not domain.
Having a custom domain isn’t a big deal, it’s really where that domain is hosted that creates forwarding issues. Since the majority of email is handled by the ‘big three’, anything that’s hosted outside of that is often flagged as spam or is refused to be delivered. That’s allegedly because there are malicious senders also hosted on third party servers (and fair enough, there likely are), but this causes a bit of a potential monopoly that could easily be abused, and there’s obvious motivation to push people into a particular service for data collection.
Even if it doesn’t happen often, occasional failures can be a huge problem if you’re sending critical communication and it isn’t reaching target inboxes because of filtering. It’s enough of a headache that even most avid self-hosters tend to avoid it.
That is absolutely unreasonable, as the email files don’t actually tell you who the sender is beyond the domain from where it’s sent. The email protocol is SUPER unsafe and really really easy to spoof as someone from the big three
Just curious what you are using. I have a domain as well, and occasionally consider setting up another email server for it. I also still have some old old accounts that are still linked to my domain email, but I just haven’t run an email server in years. Is it something turnkey that I don’t need to spend weeks configuring? In fact I might only turn it on long enough to receive emails so that I can change the accounts.
I use Mailcow and it works well. Easy to configure, and it uses Docker so it’s self-contained and very easy to move to a new server if you ever need to do that.
I’m using an SMTP relay for outbound emails, though. I didn’t want to have to deal with IP reputation issues, especially with Microsoft/Hotmail. I’m hosting my server on a VPS, and spammers in the same subnet can result in the entire subnet getting blocklisted. Configuring a relay is easy in Mailcow’s UI, and can be configured per domain.
I am not happy with my provider, currently waiting for the email hosting to expire so that I can maintain just the domain there and eventually user zoho for hosting
