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.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System IMAP Internet Message Access Protocol for email ISP Internet Service Provider NAS Network-Attached Storage SMTP Simple Mail Transfer Protocol TLS Transport Layer Security, supersedes SSL VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
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Email/calendar/contacts on EU server: posteo.de
They support IMAP and DAV
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
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.
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
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.
Self-hosting email is like making your own butter.
It’s possible, but most people don’t want to take it on themselves.
Calendar and contacts I’d argue are good candidates to self host. If a config is off and you can’t access them for a day or two, does it matter?
But if email is down, you risk missing something important. If you have a trust issue and everything you send is getting flagged as spam? Hard and slow to fix.
If the problem you’re trying to solve is Flaky and Unethical Big Tech, I would look at finding another, smaller provider and paying for it. Rolling it yourself is a great way to learn entirely too much about mail servers and spending way too much of your free time on it.
I built a system to solve all that. Completely Foss. I’m self employed and needed it for my work. Davx for carddav, caldav, tasks etc. Email via postfix/dovecot and sogo for web interface and syncing. All working seamlessly for any custom domain. I give these out to my bigger customers usually as a free addon. But it’s realiable and safe and hosted in Germany (not at home) with offsite backup in the Netherlands. How much space are you looking for?
I host my email, just not at home but on a rented server.
Here I documented it all https://wiki.gardiol.org/4-e-mail-hosting
It works, its been working for decades now. Never had significant issues…
Email is quite resilient. Servers keep trying to send again and again messages for hours before they give up… So a backup server is not even really required.
If incoming emails bounce, normal email servers will see that and retry later. Not that I personally deal with email- I outsource it to Disroot.org :)
Went to look since I had never heard of it. Found this, lol.
I just pay Hetzner 2.50-ish euros per month for their cheapest mail hosting offer and call it a day. I did self-host mail for quite some time, it was a huge PITA to set up and keep working. Every now and then I even had issues with my mails not being delivered to outlook addresses (f u M$), so I just gave it up and switched to Hetzner. Their cheapest plan even includes one domain, so depending on the domain you choose, it’s not even 1€ per month for the actual email hosting
I have run my own mail server for 20+ years. I set up everything correctly, including DKIM and DMARC. I have had the same IPs for 10 years. I send <100 emails a month. A few years ago Google started putting most of my emails in spam, and Microsoft started silently deleting them. They will not fix it. I had to start paying for a relay for outgoing messages.
Use migadu.com.
I ended up just paying for a private host. Now’s the time of year to find one, with all of the Black Friday/Cyber Monday promotions taking place.
Email’s not nearly as hard to host as people make it out to be. It is intimidating, yes, and there are a few very specific gotchas that make it infeasible or impractical from most if not all home internet connections, but if you’re willing to outsource just a little bit on that one particular point so that you have a static, commercial-grade IP address somewhere that you can get reverse DNS and open up SMTP ports on, the rest of it is mostly just fighting with your usual, standard self-hosting struggles of getting it configured and working at all, then making sure it’s secure and stays secure, and making sure your data is protected. The setup might be slightly more advanced than some other services just due to the number of moving parts, but it’s not fundamentally any different than a webserver. There are some other issues that might crop up a little later in the game, managing your mail server’s reputation for not sending spam (especially if, at some point, someone DOES get access and starts sending spam, you need to figure out how to recover your reputation). But overall it’s manageable, I’ve been self-hosting my email for like 30 years. It sucks, but it’s worth it.
My domain’s mail is hosted at https://purelymail.com/ $10/year. They seem to run on AWS hardware, so it’s not free of US big tech. It’s dirt cheap, but I’ve never had any problems, either receiving or sending. They have very clear instructions for getting your domain’s mail set up.
I run Maddy on a VPS. It’s pretty much trouble-free.
You don’t want to host your own email.
I use a host and they have an email service. If I complain to them about my emails, their response is “do not use us as your primary source of emails”.
If a webhost does not want to be responsible for your emails, you should not be in charge of your own emails.
