This Microsoft outage being the last drop in the bucket, I’m looking to get my email/calendar/contacts somewhere under my control.
As I already self-host a number of things (e.g. my Linux ISO collection), and have services exposed to the internet, it would make sense to run it at home.
After all, it’s not heavy lifting. It’s not hosting 500+ mailboxes for 100+ people. It’s just little old me, with a handful of domains, catch-all receiving and a few dedicated sending addresses.
However email is a bit more mission critical than my smarthome control or self hosted LLMs. Downtime could be critically bad, and I still don’t trust my home setup to be truly 99.999999% available.
I don’t mind paying for a service but if I do I’d prefer something European, given I’m based in the UK (and otherwise am an EU citizen).
I’m really curious how y’all solve it. I guess I’m interested in some kind of hybrid solution where there’s my own server and a hosted service, latter which acts as a backup solution, but still fully synced, so if my internet or power goes out (or my server goes down), I can still get mail sent and delivered.
So I’m not only just interested in the stack you run for email but the entire infrastructure, especially if you’ve solved this sort of off-site fallback service.
Just a mailbox at IONOS for 1x Busimess plan and 25 free (2gb) mailbox.
Costs me 7€ per month. And so far almost zero downtime.What the fuck you are paying 7 Euro PER MONTH for your mailbox?
I own a business. We hit 9 years in September. When we started we did O365. At that time, a business as small as us had to go with a Microsoft “partner” because MS wasn’t going to deal with a business as small as us. We were immediately “man in the middle” hacked. We’d been in business 3 months and someone was grabbing our incoming emails and replying as if they were us. We had no idea. They changed payment terms and re-routed our checks as direct payments to some digital accounts in Miami (USA). I have no doubt that it was our Microsoft “partner” that set us up with O365 and Lync (this was a long time ago). When we pressed Microsoft about it they became totally unresponsive or nasty. We lost about $25,000 dollars right at the very beginning of our business. It was a very dark time for me. But, honestly, that was the best $25K I ever spent. Talk about “attack Surface”.!!! Now I do Fastmail, Nextcloud a nd other self hosted services. I am absolutely convinced that losing $25k was an absurd bargain. People on O365/ SharePoint/Teams get hacked every fucking day. But they don’t tell you about it.
Agree with most folks here, mail is too hard to self host because of the control larger providers hold around acceptance rules. I use zoho for my email, been pretty solid so far though I’m sure there are others. I use nextcloud for contacts, tried using nextcloud for calendar but had trouble getting it to send invites to people so I just use zoho for calendar as well now.
Off site fallback I sync email, calendar and contacts to multiple machines but I also use back blaze as an off site cloud backup. One day I’ll get around to syncing the emails to my home server and also backing those up to backblaze.
This is all for personal use though, if I was doing anything enterprise or mission critical I’d just pay another provider to do it who isn’t a vibe coded nonsense factory.
I self-host it with https://gitlab.com/simple-nixos-mailserver/nixos-mailserver.
- I had to set it up with all these SPF and DKIM and DMARC stuff. Wasn’t too hard, just follow the guide. Test with GMail - the message details view says exactly what you have, what you haven’t, and what’s wrong.
- Every now and then I have to jump through some hoops to get my IP allowlisted in some weird provider or antispam system.
Email is a very old protocol, it originates from the time when computers were connected only occasionally. It is very much possible to come an agreement to power up the antennas at something o’clock every day to exchange emails, and the rest of the time they just sit in the queue.
Practically speaking, if your home lab is down for something like 12h, it should not impact email delivery much at all - the sending servers would just keep retrying. Usually for 48h. From https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5321#section-4.5.4.1
mail that cannot be transmitted immediately MUST be queued and periodically retried by the sender.
The sender MUST delay retrying a particular destination after one attempt has failed.
Retries continue until the message is transmitted or the sender gives up; the give-up time generally needs to be at least 4-5 days.
Microsoft documents this: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/defender-office-365/mail-flow-about#mail-flow-delivery-faq
Deferred messages remain in our queues for one day.
I guess technically they’re RFC-compliant, but 1 day is not as much as I’d like…
Were you actually able to get good domain reputation with your sever on a residential ip?
No idea. I keep hearing the term, “IP reputation”, but I don’t know any official registry where I could look up mine.
- I can deliver to GMail, because I set up SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and that special GMail-only TXT record in DNS:
"google-site-verification=<base64-or-what>" - I can deliver to Outlook, because I registered by IP in https://check.spamhaus.org/
- Every now and then, I encounter a new, weird and wonderful kind of spam protection, and I have to figure out how to get my IP listed in the “known legit email servers”
All told, I can deliver email, AFAICT. If it lands in spam, well, tough luck - email from large providers also does.
- I can deliver to GMail, because I set up SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and that special GMail-only TXT record in DNS:
I’m going back to my KISS mindset.
I got the Mozilla ThunderMail invite and using ThinderBird for the client. It’s all basic, direct and just works.
Mail is a piece of software I won’t bother self-hosting. I already tried, put in it a lot of time, trying to get my IP address considered safe because it was banned 15 years before I had it, to only have a third of my mail sent successfully received. It is not worth the effort and I switched to proton and recently to infomaniak.
Mailo.com is a privacy friendly email provider in France. As far as I know they do only email.
Recently they upped the prices a bit, my account is from before that, and payed 60 euro for five years.
I’m hosting my own, on a dedicated Hetzner server (used for a bunch of stuff, “dedicated” as in “only me on the hardware”), using nixos-mailserver.
I’ve a 10/10 score on all the spam tests / deliverability tests I could find. The only deliverability issue I’ve ever had is t-online, but only because they require you to apply for being allowlisted, lmao. (Was one quick email to do that though, so… fine.)
It’s been a couple of years of smooth sailing now, so I’m not super worried anymore; esp. in the beginning though, it was a bit anxiety-inducing (and I did cause some downtime by fucking up my bootloader and needing a KVM from Hetzner at one point, that was a very sweaty evening not least because the email address I had put for contact info was, well, handled by the server that was down. Btw Hetzner email you the link to your KVM. Fun times!).
Anyways: I’m really happy with my setup now, in all aspects. Calendar and contacts self-hosting is also great.
But, just so you know: you will not be able to do this on your residential IP. Doesn’t matter how hard you try, it will not work. You’ll be able to receive emails no problem, but if you’re lucky you’ll end up in people’s spam folder. More likely, the recipient server will just outright reject or discard your mail.
How much do you spend on the hetzner service?
~46€/month for the server via their server auctions (triple 512GB SSDs in a zpool, 64GB RAM, i7-7700, in their German datacenter with unlimited Gbit internet… not too shabby!) . Unfortunately, looking at them now, they’ve shot up in price (wonder why… 🙄).
That’s overkill though. As long as you can get something with full root access and a dedicated IP (which includes their VPS offerings, I am pretty sure), you’re good.
I know everyone is already glazing Hetzner, but let me just add to the pile… I’ve been customer at a lot of (mostly web, sometimes vps)-hosters over the years, but I don’t think I’ll ever switch away from Hetzner again. Even if they raise prices further. They give you full control, don’t try to upsell, and more importantly, have excellent support.
As others have mentioned, hosters often block outgoing email ports. This includes Hetzner. Sent them an email, 5min later, ports are open. Need a KVM? Press a button, it’ll be ready in a couple of minutes, once a technician has walked over to your machine and plugged it in. Are you as stupid as I am and have no access to the email account receiving the KVM link? Call support, no queue, immediate problem resolution. One of the SSDs looks like it’s gonna give out soon? Press a button in the dashboard, a technician will come around in a couple of minutes and swap the drive, free of charge.
IDK it just feels like I’m getting enterprise support for consumer prices.
Also I just now realize you only asked for a price, so everything beyond the first sentence is just me rambling.
I sure hope you’re using that for a lot more than email.
Yes, I am 😄
Though I originally did get this for email. Wanted a dedicated server with triple SSDs for redundancy, and the i7+64G was the cheapest option!
Ah, different times.
But yes, I’m regularly maxing out CPU + RAM for hours on end.
I also self-host email on a Hetzner VPS. I pay about 9 Euros/Month.
Iirc hosting your own mailboxes is easy. Making sure others can actually get your sent emails is a pain in the arse. It’s a cartel.
One thing you should know, the SMTP protocol is designed to work with intermittent network connections like modem, each email has several days of grace period, with many retries, so you don’t need 99.999% uptime.
Hosting in Aus, dovecot + postfix. It’s been solid.
Mail is something I don’t want to touch. I use mailbox which is hosted in germany for some years now. For calendar & contacts I use the built-in Nextcloud apps, they also work pretty well
Edit: I self-host Nextcloud, so contacts & calender are on my private server
Same here in terms of don’t want to touch mail. I use migadu, swiss company hosting in france. Works flawlessly. There was a good blogpost some time ago comparing mail services, let me check… there it is: Blogpost
Where did you find where are they hosted? I couldn’t find it on their website last ve looked them up. Too bad they only accept $, I had considered them heavily because I like their mindset regarding inbox/folder.
I went with Soverin to have unlimited alias included in my plan.
https://www.migadu.com/procon/#in-switzerland-but-servers-are-not
In Switzerland, but servers are not
This may come as a surprise, but we do not host our servers in Switzerland. Current data centers are located in France. We may in the near future add Swiss data centers too but this is not our priority.
We find EU privacy laws much more elaborate and restrictive than the Swiss ones. Switzerland used to be famous for banking secrecy, but that has nothing to do with digital data.
Yea, me aswell. Also in the mailbox and am really happy with their service, but don’t they use Open-Xchange? I don’t think its Nextcloud.
Mailbox uses Open-xchange, but the user most likely has nextcloud selfhosted.
yep thats the case, should have written my message better ^^"
I self-host a metric fuck tonne of services and (with my extensive email background) I choose to outsource my email services.
You CAN do it today. But should you? Given DMARC, SPF, etc… No.
Since I left Gmail’s free GAFYD feature, I moved to Fastmail (Australian) years ago. Does it cost money? Yes. Does it do everything I want? Yes. Does it have features Google would never provide? Yes.
Do I have any reservations or regrets? No.
I’ve self-hosted email for over 20 years but I’m now moving to Fastmail for two reasons: (1) succession, I’m the only one in my house that understands how it works, and (2) email is never fully under your control and the large providers may decide to filter/drop email from your domain. But this is self-hosted, and I did enjoy my years doing it, so go for it if you want. I had good luck with OpenBSD/OpenSMTPD/Dovecot stack. Good luck!
Edit: I forgot to mention you can do a hybrid approach; handle receiving yourself and use a service like smtp2go.com to do delivery.
I selfhost. My ISP has a mail relay so it doesn’t appear to come from my residential IP. The problem is that the relay is on more blacklists than I am.
I’ve been using smtp2go for the past 2 ish years for outbound email, and it’s been great! I have no complaints.
I’ve been meaning to set up something similar. I really don’t feel like dealing with reliable delivery, but I also don’t want to give my plentiful incoming mail to someone just so I can send like 5 emails a year.
