I’m tempted to move to email with my own domain, but don’t really care about the server side of things, I guess I’m following the line that self hosted email is not easy to do, and not sure how reliable I can make my servers.

The other option is to have some other system do the email hosting, and if it is through my domain then there should be no issues with moving around if needed. Hosting all the email archive isn’t really needed either, I’d be fine self hosting or storing the archive.

Is there a set up where some remote service handles email exchange, and you just sync with it eg through POP style interfaces? Id actually prefer if my own server was doing the sync rather than a desktop running Thunderbird etc, that way it is kind of self hosted but also robust to down time. What’s the best practice along these lines?

  • NoLemurs@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    11 hours ago

    You can use imapsync to keep a local synced copy your email in maildir format. That, along with a domain you own, solves the “I own my own email sycned to my server” problem pretty much completely. Switching email providers is just syncing to the new server (which imapsync supports) and updating your MX records on your domain.

    Some email clients (like aerc) can just operate on the maildir directly. That’s what I do, but there are lots of ways to do this.

    One option is to just keep using your email client the way you are now talking directly to your mailserver, and just rely on the imapsync side to be your owned backup/migration path.

    Alternatively you can run your own local IMAP or POP server like Dovecot backed by the local maildir. So that’s imapsync -> dovecot -> thunderbird (or similar). It’s a little more software to set up, but once it’s set up it should be very reliable and gives you total control over what email client you use and full ownership of your data.

    • eyesaremosaics@lemmy.zipOPEnglish
      1·
      10 hours ago

      Thanks, that sounds useful.

      Do you know of a self hosted webmail interface that has good features? So I guess that would run on the self hosted mail archive after imapsync.

      • NoLemurs@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        10 hours ago

        I don’t have any personal experience with self hosted webmail. I know there are a bunch out there and definitely both options that can sit in front of a maildir and options that can sit in front of a POP/IMAP server like Dovecot.

        I did a little googling, and if I wanted to set this up, the first thing I’d check out is something like imapsync -> dovecot -> Roundcube.

        Dovecot provides a really reliable maildir -> IMAP/POP conversion layer, and once you’ve got that, most things should work.