I give up.
I tried left and right to try to install an email server so I could degoogle my life.
But therechnical barrier is thick and Google keeps adding more to it. Forget it. I can’t even get thru the installation process much less trying to get my shit off Google.
I figure, I don’t actually have any need for my email addresses. Just like my phone number. I never call anyone. I’m going to discourage my kids from using email at all. I’ll remind everyone I know that I don’t use email at every opportunity I get just like I remind people to not call me and that my phone number is not available.
Between spammers and Google, I just don’t need this headache in my life. My mom is much less technically savvy than the average pet. So Google will just siphon her data and when the megabits are full then you just delete the old stuff.
You don’t need it. No one will spend their life reading your emails when you’re gone or watching your videos or listening to your recordings or viewing your photos. There’s no need to worry about just deleting the pile of shit you’ve accumulated. I’m this done.
I don’t self-host email but I don’t use my own domain to have control over it. Look into FastMail and a custom domain. That’s the happy path.
Personally I don’t self-host email :
- For personal emails, I use posteo.de
- For accounts, I use alias vault
You don’t have to use Gmail. There are many, many other options.
Given I don’t need too much privacy for generic E-Mails (I use my Tuta mail address for that) I’m using purelymail with advanced pricing for ~5€/year. (If I cared more about privacy in emails I’d use Tuta for 3€/month)
I just checked out Posteo and Purelymail but one question lingers… How do I get all my emails out of their servers immediately as I get them and into a centrally accessible server that I can use to search thru my email from any device and accumulate more than just 3gb or 4gb or 15gb or whatever the next service’s limitations might be?
The reason I shouldn’t serve my own is because we have blackouts during storms so if I was traveling I wouldn’t be able to access things that would require email confirmation as a 2nd factor. That’s one reason for example.
But yeah I would like to have many devices be able to access the same emails thru a webmail client.
Short answer: IMAP and the
mbsynctool (aka “isync”). It can sync between two IMAP accounts or between IMAP and local storage (either/both ways).If you just want syncing between two IMAP accounts there’s also
imapsync, which is available both as a program and as an online service run by the guy who maintains the program, priced as “pay what you want”, which can migrate your inbox on the fly to another service.What I’ve done myself is to run mbsync periodically (made myself a custom Alpine image with cron and mbsync) to bring emails over. Added an IMAP server container on top of the local copy of the emails (tons of options, Dovecot is popular). Added a webmail app behind reverse proxy, talking to the IMAP server on a private docker network (Roundcube). And a Borg Backup job to take an extra backup (incremental, deduplicated and encrypted) of the email archive.
In theory I could also connect the webmail to the SMTP of whatever email provider I’m currently using and be able to use it to also send. I don’t do that because I have email clients connected to the provider on both desktop and phone so it’s not a requirement, but I could if I wanted to.
This approach lets me periodically trim down the emails stored at the provider to only the most recent. This lets me also use providers that offer small amounts of storage. My recent emails are available instantly through IMAP to the provider. Starting within last 24h and going back forever they’re available at the archive webmail.
I can switch email providers at any time as fast as DNS records propagate (because I use @my.own.domains) and as fast as I can update the IMAP/SMTP credentials for my phone/desktop/mbsync.
I haven’t played with email extraction to my own server yet (their server is perfectly syncing my devices and has basic searching) but regarding limits: Purelymail’s advanced pricing is 4€/year + usage (very fair prices for usage). So you aren’t hitting limits. Theres a calculator on their advanced pricing site that lets you input numbers and tells you how much you’d pay.
Running your own email server is easy.
Getting your email accepted by other servers is hard.
Hosting anything publicly requires a significant amount of hardening.
Neither of those two tasks are easy or low maintenance. I self host almost everything and I’ve run my own mail server (with occasional rejection). It’s not worth it for me; I now use a commercial, paid provider for email.
People repeat and repeat that email is hard but it’s a legend. I have been self hosting for years on a residential ip and a random domain and it just works
I self hosted for many years but gave up due to family members complaining about the occasional rejection. You are made of stronger stuff than I am, kudos.
You were ambitious providing it for your family
Self host all the services you want, but don’t ever touch sendmail and bind. The most constantly attacked services I’ve ever had my ass on the line for. I won’t even manage them for money anymore.
Sounds like a deal to me.
Sorry you’re having a bad time. Dockerized Mailu has been working great for me for about a year now. Difficult in the beginning but worth it. Glad I got though it.
Try tutamail or proton if you want to degoogle.
I prefer to follow the advice from people who actually set up and maintain email servers: “Fucking don’t. It’s not worth it.”
Just get a custom domain and run it through an existing email provider.
I’ve been running my own eMail server for almost a quarter century, and I have no clue what all the fuss is about.
Sure, providers are getting very picky about what domains that they will receive eMails from. But that’s why I have gMail, Yahoo, and Microsoft webmail accounts - so I can train their systems by exchanging emails once a quarter.
And yes, you do have to be running whitelists and blacklists and tarpits and have a good Fail2Ban in place. And good geoIP system if you want to cut out regions that you are unlikely to ever have legitimate mail originate from. But that’s just common sense security.
I hate that it’s come to this, but you are right.
It’s not that it’s too difficult, it’s that there are too many things beyond your control due to the central duopoly of Google and Microsoft for email. If you end up in their bad graces it’s hard to get out, and they don’t care about you, there’s no support or someone to talk to to get off the ban list.
Would you care to give some additional context here? I haven’t had the itch to host my own e-mail, but what kinds of misfortune do you encounter when you’re not in the good graces of Google of Microsoft? And what could land you in that situation?
Mostly reputation of your IP address and domain, things which are hard to untangle. If you manage to get a clean IP you might be all clear.
There’s other configurations that are required and if not right can harm your reputation, it isn’t something you can set and forget.
What is your reputation in this context? And what does losing it cost you?
Deliverability to major providers like Google or Microsoft. Can be just getting your emails flagged as spam, or them being sikently dropped and never delivered even to spam. Making it impossible know if your emails are being ignored by the recipient or not even delivered to their inbox. It’s also impossible to troubleshoot.
Maybe you said so in some lingo that’s foreign to me, but what upsets that reputation? What kinds of configurations do they not like, and why is it not set and forget? Sorry for asking for a dissertation, but I never had any idea e-mail could be more complicated than set and forget.
There are a few standards now, DKIM, SFP, DMARC, maybe more now, I don’t know. If you send emails without these configured correctly the reputation of the domain and IP are lowered.
Past some internal threshold, you go from inbox to spam, and from spam to silently dropped.
Further, if you send too many emails in a short time, or more emails than usual, your reputation is lowered.
I’m sure there’s more, but these are the kind of things that make it difficult. You make a config error, don’t realize, then people start not getting your emails. You fix the config, but there’s no way to get the reputation back and nobody at Microsoft or Google to ask to re-evaluate you.
Yes exactly. For me, I could figure it out given enough weekends. But screw that. For my wife, my kids, my mom and dad, those things are hyroglyphics.
weird to see someonengetting worked up about a service he barely uses and sending little data by default.
Hell is other people. My wife opens her new phone and says! Hey why am I running out of space already! See my gmail says I got no more space!
I tried syncthing and it was great for a while. Now I got an rsync script that I gotta run from time to time.
But wouldn’t it be great if The email just came off the bastards and into my own central server instead? That’s what I’ve been trying hard to do. I’m just not hitting the ball on this one. Mailcow, mailserver, stalwart, and a good other bunch. I always just get stuck in some part of the installation or end up with issues sending or receiving. But thinking about it, if I have issues, she’s going to have issues. So it’s not even worth it.
I like email.
I pay for my own domain. I pay a privacy focused European provider for email and they let me use my own domain. I use an European DNS provider.
So I have email addresses with my own domain and the setup is pretty straightforward and I can use webmail or a desktop|mobile client.
I mean I did an email transfer as a multihat guy at a small business and mx records are a bitch. granted more so because there needs to be no loss or delay. might be easier for an individual. but I don’t roll my own.
You don’t need your own email server to degoogle your life.
Yes selfhosting it is awesome but it’s definitely not the simplest service to do host.
I think what OP means is that you can mix using an external email provider with storing your own email archive + an IMAP server + a webmail app. You can let the provider deal with the IP reputation and all that pain and just use their SMTP and IMAP to send email and pull to your local server, respectively. If you use your own domain you can also switch the provider in 10 minutes by simply changing your DNS records and retain the same address.
The hard part for me when giving up Gmail wasn’t the stuff above, it was tracking down all the places I was subscribed as @gmail.com and replacing it with @my.domain addresses. That took about 6 months. The local pull + IMAP + webmail took a weekend to set up.
I outsourced my email to a provider.
Works great and only coats me 8€ per month for not having to wrestle IP spamlists, mailserver maintenance and reachability.Never self host email. It’s way too much of a pain.
Why people keep spreading this misinformation? It’s plainly not true and I am the living proof of that.
Been using my email self hosted (on VPs) for decades now, never had serious issues at all. And it’s all my family primary addresses
I don’t say it’s impossible. It’s just not worth it 90% of the people, especially for beginners.
Never said it’s for beginners. It’s not.
You must understand what you do and do it properly. IT’s not drop a container and run mindless. Regardless, you can do it if you take the proper precautions and have fun doing it.
I think the general gist is as beginner self hosters we get more and more comfortable too “easily spin up a docker webserver”
At some point we arrive at “what other services can i host” and email is a pretty obvious addition expecting it to at least not be more difficult then running nextcloud.
It may be doable but hell is it not a comparable challenge.
I fully agree …
Email server require to understand what and why you are doing. This is a steep step up from spinning docker containers.
Nothing against docker containers, I run quite a few myself… But indeed a successful email server is a different beast.
Many people also try self host it at home, and this is a serious issue with email due to the residential ip address as well.
But it can be done successfully and it’s a great feeling of accomplishment when you do it. And you learn way more than using containers
Also all containerized solutions for email require the understanding and additional steps like DNS done properly as well .
I worked for years on a large email infrastructure for a job and for me it’s absolutely not worth it either.
I would prefer to take a subscription on a reputable host.
Why?
Because even if I do everything perfectly at setup (TLS, SPF, DKIM, DMARC) that will still be precarious.
The security of SMTP is a patchwork of protocols added on top of it and a bunch of opaque reputation systems. If anything ever goes wrong with my email my domain’s reputation would fall. And that’s the thing, once your domain reputation goes too low, you can’t fix right away and say “my bad” and recover. Your mail will be silently blocked like Spam until a few days of sending perfectly clean emails. You need time to recover.
So mail self hosting is accepting that at any time if you make a slight mistake, your communications to other will be almost impossible for days. And again since a lot of it is reputation based you can’t fix the issue and recover immediately.
The business I was working for had everyday scenarios like that. A client that failed to update its DKIM and didn’t notice right away. When they do their reputation on for example Cisco’s platform is super low and we filter them as spam. And then it took days for them to recover even if they fixed the DKIM just one or two days after their mistake.
On the other hand I could take a protonmail subscription and use a domain that has so much volume and is tracked so carefully in term of reputation that I know my mails will be received and have all the necessary security done right.
These reputation systems are inherently difficult for small volume mail domains. There is no other users ln your domain so one mistake is all it takes to start having delivery issues and most importantly silent failed deliveries that you dont know about.
Is it possible? Yes. Is it necessary? Not really. If you can pay for a privacy respecting host…
Hence for me it’s not worth it because there are privacy respecting providers so it’s not like I absolutely have to self host it.
One wrong config entry, and you have an open relay and a domain that can never be used for SMTP again, yay.
Actually managing an email server properly is demanding, as it is one of the most attacked services. Of course, you can also take the easy route and just pray.
Sorry man, i understand your fears, but it’s not that difficult. Granted, you need to STUDY and UNDERSTAND what you do, it’s not just deploy a container and run. But hey, you can give up on learning new stuff and don’t run risks ever, in that case you should also stop driving a car, since it’s much more dangerous than running an open relay by error.
Also, use mailcow stalwart or any other already packaged solution if you want to be safe.
I used mailcow, got an open relay immediately. Stalwart seems to do things a bit better.
I host so many services and it is not that I don’t want to learn new stuff. The effort is simply too high for a single service. And since there are very good providers which fully encrypt your data, I went this route to keep my mind off this part of my system.
I fully understand your point, but the mailcow as open relay seems strange. Anyway, it’s a risk/cost tradeoff right? Everybody should do it’s own assessment and experimentation. But after the initial setup, it’s zero maintenance. The only maintenance i do is keep the stack regularly updated, and it broke twice in 20+ years (dovecot new config format, WTF…)
I had long discussions with some mailcow contributors and it turns out, that some default settings can lead to an open relay if you are not careful. The biggest problem is that they use postfix. Postfix is not bad itself, as it is probably the most battle tested mail server. The configuration of postfix is a different story. And even if I prefer battle tested GNU/BSD software, postfix would be one of the rare exceptions where I would be careful.
I had a postfix running for years without issues, when I self-hosted SimpleLogin, and I fully agree with you. Once it runs, you only need to make sure that the security is managed.
Because it works for you, doesn’t mean it’s easy. If you have the experience, and done it at least once successfully, it’s “easy”. Compared to the average self-hosted configure and run a docker image and reverse proxy it’s objectively harder to run.
The issue is not running the individual components or servers, but that there’s infrastructure and to some extent crypto involved, which is just outside of the comfort zone for many. You tried to host it like any other thing on your homelab? Nope. Has your VPS been involved in spam? Enjoy the blacklist you’ll never find out about and the debugging why it doesn’t work. No experience in managing your DNS? Have fun getting DMARC/DKIM/SPF to work.
Theres just way more stuff that needs to be done, and a lot of it will fail silently.
I fully agree with you: it’s NOT easy. And you must understand what you do. It’s not just deploy a container and run happy.
I might say this is the first serious step for a selfhoster, something that goes over and beyond just hosting a service for yourself and fun, since it federates (modern term fur how email works) with the outside world.
Are you scared of hosting email? don’t do it. You want to learn and improve your skills and you are happy with running the risks associated? go for it.
Anyway tools like stalwart and mailcow do provide full instructions for DKIM/DMARK and DNS records that you only need to follow, so today there are easier options than the “old days”.
Anyway you don’t have to do it on your primary email from day one, just use a test account/domain and see how it goes. Keep using your gmail account and spin it up on a secondary domain, if it works good… switch over in 6 months or 2 years as you are confortable. OTherwise, keep gmail and stop.
I fully agree with you: it’s NOT easy. And you must understand what you do. It’s not just deploy a container and run happy.
This is literally what you’ve called misinformation.
Again, not everyone is self-hosting only for learning and experimentation only. Making a deliberate call that mailing infra might be too hard might be too hard, have too big of a knowledge gap, or is simply not worth the effort is something I’d call more serious than hardlining on “self host everything or stay on gmail”, especially in the case of mailing, where it’s pretty much impossible to self-host on your own hardware / network.
Full instructions do not reduce any effort or resources involved or complexity of the problem. And the problem is that you’re suddenly moving from “I’m hosting a few services” to being balls deep in networking, dns, and a deceivingly easy protocol which blows up in complexity due to being federated and absolutely dominated by big providers at the same time, and all of the extensions for security.
Except for learning, self-hosting serves a purpose. You might want privacy, you might not want to be dependent on corpo infra or external services at all, you might want to host something that offers something more or better than a SaaS solution - but first of all, it needs to work. For mail, you gain none of those. Self-hosting on your own hardware (or rather network) is pretty much impossible, so you’re reliant on a hosting provider at least. There is basically zero difference in functionality between mailing servers or providers. Sure, you’ll run into problems when copy pasting instructions, but those problems will break the service. Fucking up your DNS or networking will break your whole server. At the same time, while failing silently it will costs a magnitude of effort more than most other usually self-hosted services.
Just because you can do it doesn’t mean it is feasible
It comes with a lot of downsides
Isn’t that the gist of selfhosting?
Yes you can do it, yes you can have it done for you by somebody else. The first is fun, and risky, the second is less fun and less risky. We are all here for the fun… and probably we all don’t care too much of the risks. But why shut down everybody who ask about email selfhosting with a don’t do it? Let them try, make errors and fix them, maybe they learn something new, maybe it works out for them
What is the worst that might come out of it? Some spam? A blacklist? Come on, you can survive both. Don’t use your primary email account as self hosted from the beginning maybe, to mitigate all those risks, no?
It’s not too bad if you use an outbound SMTP relay for sending. SMTP2Go is pretty good, and they have a free plan with 1000 emails per month. I use Mailcow and you can configure relays in their web UI, but it works just as well with the
sender_dependent_relayhost_mapssetting in Postfix.Sure, it’s not fully self-hosted, but the interesting part to self-host is the storage of your emails, not the sending (which will just relay through other SMTP servers along the way anyways).
If it was painful for you, this does not mean nobody should even try. FMPOV my mailbox contains too much personal information to host in in the cloud.
What is the problem? I have been self hosting my mail for the last 20+ years and has always worked pretty well.
I rent a VPS for that since you should not use a residential address for email servers.
If you are careful enough to configure it properly I assure you that it works and it’s perfectly usable and stable
All my family primary email addresses are managed in that way on my various domains and we never had a single issue
Today it’s even easier because there are all in one docker based solutions. But going the hard way is perfectly doable as well.
Here is my experience, on my wiki, if you are interested https://wiki.gardiol.org/doku.php?id=email%3Astart
Be aware that there are no optional steps: everything must be properly installed and setup from DNS entries to dkim/dmarc and certificates. But I promise, maintenance it basically zero after a proper setup. And I think twice in 20 years something broke. And the nice part of that email will just be delayed and delivered after you fix it, nothing gets ever lost
I love email, with all it downfalls, it’s still one of the most resilient and solid stuff on the internet.
I promise, maintenance it basically zero after a proper setup.
Well, it was close to zero for me until the last year dovecot update (2.3→2.4) that has broken old configs. I’ve spent a lot of time fixing them.
Yes … That is what pissed me…
But half day of cussing and swearing helped
Same here, I have been doing that for around 20 years now too and I started out with postfix and a list of vmails in a text file.
I wonder where this myth comes from. People host way more out there stuff themselves, but somehow email is too scary …
Because 99% of helfhosters pull containers, with zero understanding of what they do. They they try email, because heck why not also email, and hit the wall of actually must understand what you are doing or else…
Yes probably selfhosting email is for advanced users, people who at least know how to manage a DNS record and how nwtworking works. Maybe it’s just that selfhosting bar has dropped significantly thanks to docker, and indeed email hosting is a bit more complex that just “docker compose pull” approach.
Yet i think people should not be scaring others so easily on email self hosting, it’s perfectly doable and fun to do. Maybe don’t switch your primary account just imediately to mitigate risks…
When you begin hosting you have to wait a bit before your email doesn’t go to spam, at least that was my experience in 2018.
Edit: I just checked and I can now deliver to Hotmail/MS365 too!
Yeah ok maybe I just need to pay for a VPS.
There was a good guide by Linuxbabe on building an email server from scratch with all the bits and pieces and antispam/email verification stuff you need to send mail to the big players, I used it a few years ago to do my server.
Here’s the collection of various guides for various ways to do it:
https://www.linuxbabe.com/category/mail-server
Yeah you also need a vps. Home addresses are pretty much all marked as spam generators these days, and most ISPs proactively block all the common inbound ports for mail servers.
That is a mandatory requirement for proper email delivery.
Not an issue with email itself, more due to spam prevention and such.
I flagree that hosting email servers on residential IPs is a recipe for being filtered and blocked
I flagree that hosting email servers on residential IPs is a recipe for being filtered and blocked
Unless your ISP gives you a static address and agrees to change PTR record to your server address. Then it’s no different than any other server on the internet. Obviously odds are that you’re not getting one or if it’s an option they’ll likely charge more than VPS is going to cost you, but it’s not unheard of.
But for the actual topic, I don’t get the myth either. I’ve got a good old postfix+dovecot setup running and the only problem I have is that spam filtering isn’t quite as good as with commercial providers, but the handful of trash coming trough is easy enough to take care of manually.
I fully agree with you.
but i guess, from other replyies, people are just afraid somehow and have deep rooted fears about email and self hosting it. The people like you and me who have actually done it, understand that’s not that impossible.
And like with anything you learn only doing it, not fearing it. Maybe don’t switch your main account just from day 0 and see how it goes… :)
Obviously there’s a ton in successful email hosting since it’s not just configuring few services. Proper DNS-records and privilege controls are mandatory, you need to occasionally clear up your domain/IP from spamlists (specially at the start) and single mistake can ruin your DNS reputation quite quickly which then takes time to build back.
But it’s still perfectly doable and, when you have proper knowledge on how the whole circus actually runs, not too difficult either. Only problem is that there’s no longer money on just email hosting since cloud hosting offers much more than just emails for the price a small gamer can’t just compete with. At least around here.
I run it on residential, and since routing outgoing mail through smtp2go I don’t even get issues with my ISP putting my IP on the PBL. Once my contract is over I’m getting a static IP with a better supplier. Been solid for over two years
Bonus of running my own inbox, I learned how to discard annoying emails that can’t be unsubscribed from
