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?
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.
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.
I’m sorry but a statement like this make me not trust you at all. Take an strangers word for something with no evidence…. This is how a mob of ignorant people do stupid things.
If you know what you’re doing, MailCheap is an option. I picked that a few years ago and MXroute was a very close second choice for me.
5 usd a year vpc… and host your own domain and mailserver
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?
Purelymail.com -- based on a similar thread here 6 months ago. They are very affordable, and I have 5 different domains hosted with them. They only bill based on traffic and storage. I liked being able to have multiple domains without any additional charges.
Postfix or opensmtpd and dovecot probably
If you self host you are at the behest of your domain registrar.
My setup is: Namesilo for domains, Hetzner VPS with autobackup, Mailcow selfhosted. (Few manual updates with backups per year). Just copy paste steps from Obsidian notes. Cloudflare DNS just in case of ddos etc.
I have 3 domains with maybe 6 emails and catch em all. I do not send/receive a lot. Maybe 5-10 emails per day. Most of them are notifications from systems.
All good. I’m happy.
Maddy self hosted + Blue mail as client for phone. But be ready to be DMARC compliant :) not difficult just annoying.
Personally I DO self-host… and I have very few problems. I get blacklisted occasionally but it’s not been a huge concern and is usually only the low-priority blacklists… I did have to go through jumping through hoops early on to get my IP accepted but I haven’t had problems in years.
For my mail server these days I use Docker Mailserver. It’s really complete as a server (no frontend though) for setting up a really good IMAP/SMTP server. I have a full docker swarm cluster running here that keeps it VERY reliable. For a frontend on my desktop I use Evolution or Thunderbird (I’m a Linux user).
For a web frontend I have a few I have played with. My current “primary driver” is Snappymail acting as a plugin to my NextCloud instance. However I’ve had good experiences using E-Groupware which is VERY feature complete as an Outlook alternative.
Hope that helps!
Zoho.
Eh Exchange
self hosted mailserver here (on an old, dedicated vps)… just dovecot/postfix/mysql and the usual (amavis & spamassasin) - if i need to add/edit/delete users or domains, that’s just a bash script.
there’s lots of other options already mentioned, but you could also consider aws for this: you set your domain up with them (or verify it), set SES to forward inbound mails to wherever you want, and set your mailclient to send out through ses.
antispam & dkim/dmarc/spf included.
Zextras Carbonio [ https://zextras.com/carbonio ] self hosted all the way.