Hi everybody,
I’ve had a domain name at Gandi.net for quite a while, which included 5 email addresses as well, hosted on my domain. Now they’re however discontinuing this offer, it will now be €3,99 per month per mailbox.
So, I’ve been looking around a bit. I need a service that allows me to connect it to my own domain name, that actually allows IMAP instead of requiring a special client, and preferably should allow me to put up several mailboxes under the same account since I currently have mailboxes for some of my family members.
Security is not a concern since this is only intended to be used for the email I send and receive under my actual legal name, and I know better than to use email for confidential material.
Zoho Mail seems like a good deal, since they have 10GB per user for only €1,13 a month. I’m just afraid that my emails might end up in spam filters since they’re based in India.
If you have iCloud+ this is included and you can use Apples Mail app
How hard is it to host your own mail server? From what I can see it look pretty much top tier
You apparently easily get your emails stuck in spam filters if you self-host. Also, you’d need to have 100% uptime for this to work as intended, not particularly easy in my situation.
While technically that is true, if you have any other users they will be annoyed. And anyone running iOS will almost immediately get regular popups about the mail server being down (because iOS checks for new mail frequently - and yes I know this can be adjusted) and so they will be telling you straight away.
Also - I’m not convinced that all email servers obey the SMTP standard.
I’ve done it, and I do not recommend it if you actually plan for people to receive your emails.
I managed to adapt for about 95% of mail servers to accept my mails, but it was a lot of work. I’m pretty sure some of those measurements are intended to discourage people from self hosting.
It took me around 4 hours to get to that point, and sometimes my mail would still go into junk, especially on gmail inboxes.
The hard part is getting a a host that allows the ports, a “clean / private” static public IP and a matching reverse lookup record for it.
Email servers and spf / dmarc / dkim are not that hard to setup. There is still going to be a “trust” period for some spam filters but if you did everything else right it isn’t too hard other than in bound spam filtering.
I’ve been running my own mail server for about 15 years now… Let me offer some insights.
- Its used by me and the family, so I do have other users who expect things to work.
- I used commodity hardware, with a Linux host (and guest).
- the mail server runs in a VM, so it is trivial to: stop, copying the VM to USB, restart.
- Maintaining uptime isn’t too bad, but when the mail server goes down, you need to get onto it quickly. I’ve had power supplies fail, HDD’s fail, memory fail.
- If you should happen to be out of town when a failure occurs (I’ve had this twice), then the server stays dead until you are back. That does not make your users happy. If its more than 4 days, then the SMTP standard says email is lost.
- There have also been a few software issues with Zimbra (my current tool) - the stats daemon filled the disk, the upgrader broke permissions all over the place multiple times. Each of these requires time to investigate, research online etc. Snapshotting is awesome! Right now I have a problem where the VM disk file is growing, but the space used inside the VM is not. I have zero’d out free space and compacted the VM but don’t know why it is happening yet. More research needed.
- You will learn to hate blocklists. There are many, and there are meta blocklists. You have to watch them because at any time, you will be added and your email will silently get dropped. Sometimes the blocklist trashes whole subnets because of a single actor, sometimes even more, and so you will get included due to other bad actors. Getting off a blocklist is hard… you send emails, you fill in web forms, you look for a contact details, you wait… Then some number of days/weeks later, you are off again.
- You have to learn DKIM, SPF, DMARK, managing DNS etc.
- I used to use self-signed certs and live with the warnings. Now I used Lets Encrypt, which is awesome!.
- You can try to get reverse DNS working, but that’s up to your ISP (who usually don’t care, so good luck). No rDNS can be viewed as bad by email recipients so your spam score starts at >0.
- If you run it at home, you will be part of a block of IPs that are known to be home users, so your spam score starts at >0.
- I’m lucky in that I run it on a spare public IP address on my server housed at work. But that will need to change soon.
I started using native Linux mailboxes, later added roundcube (web UI), investigated Mailinabox, but now use zimbra. That gives me calendar/contact sharing, email/calendar/contacts to iOS devices (which is the main way my family get email), and lots more. Moving data from one to the other took a couple of days of effort. (Yeah… I know its supposed to be trivial, but its not when you include tool research, testing, execution one at a time etc).
Bottom line - you will learn lots, you will lose many weekends and sometimes a weekday here or there as you try to handle emergencies, it will never be set-and-forget.
My original rational was learning, privacy and my own domain and nicer looking email addresses than john1234@gmail.com. I’m looking for an online alternative as its time to lighten the load, but I have a lot of services that we use in Zimbra.
Good luck with it!
I forgot to mention - spam isn’t too bad with a well trained SpamAssassin.
Plus you will need to learn your virtualisation tool really well because of all the networking routes required and operating it on the command line. VBoxManage is your friend, but its just not friendly.
From a security perspective - I did everything in Linux, and only opened the required ports (plus ssh, which I moved to a random high port number). I have auto-update on for security patches, but NOT for regular patches (because Zimbra tends break things, so you need to snapshot first).
iCloud Plus if you don’t care kids in Africa and would like simplicity.
Update: don’t beat me guys I’m using Proton 😢
https://proton.me/ Are worth a look at. The allow custom domains and I believe have IMAP support. Additionally they encrypt everything they store so are very good from a privacy side (at least as far as you can be private using email).
They only sorta provide IMAP. You need to run Proton Bridge on your computer and that program will connect to their service and provide a local IMAP connection to your mail app of choice. It’s all a bit hacky but works well enough.
That’s a sign that they aren’t goofing on the encrypted part. If done right, they can’t decrypt your emails to hand them over on IMAP, so a bridge would be necessary to decrypt on your equipment, then hand off the decrypted mail to your IMAP client. It’s nice they offer that solution.
It’s a sign they use non-standard tech and lock you in progressively… while touting encryption at rest as a big advantage, when it doesn’t mean anything for email.
The Proton bubble is one evil acquisition away from bursting.
What’s the point with emails that were transmitted unencrypted over the Internet right before that? It’s like sending a post card via mail and then putting it into a safe at the receiver’s side. Sure it’s secure there, but that’s entirely pointless.
I use proton for my domains email too, but consider that their integration with other services is pretty bad. I haven’t found a proper tool for calenders sync, and email sync with thunderbird or other clients requires a extra app.
The pro of choosing them is that you get all their services: VPN, password manager, storage, calendar.
