[Solved] What do I need to setup for an email-proxy? (programming.dev)

submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by onlinepersona@programming.dev to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

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Solution: FetchMail + Dovecot. Just need to set it up, but it's pretty much what I was looking for.

The goal is to allow easily moving away from an email provider e.g from protonmail to tutanota or fastmail or whatever. How do people achieve this?

I just want to have myname@mydomain, the emails to go to whichever managed email service that allows it, and to then grab everything from that service with POP to then self-host a proxy that multiple devices can connect to. STMP can go either to my hosted server or the managed host, doesn't matter.

The idea is explicitly not to do the job of a managed email service. No DKIM, no SPF, no DMARC, none of that.

Distro is NixOS, but can adapt any instructions given. Mentioning just in case somebody already has a nix configuration with this setup.

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[-] NotEasyBeingGreen@slrpnk.net 4 points 3 months ago

I'm old school, and would set up Fetchmail. It can pull down either POP or IMAP (I haven't used POP in 25+ years, but I guess it works fine still). Then I'd run Dovecot or some other IMAP server on my host to read mail from there.

[-] onlinepersona@programming.dev 4 points 3 months ago

Yes, this is what I was looking for! Thank you.

Now I just have to find out how to configure everything to my liking.

[-] fizzle@quokk.au 2 points 3 months ago

My experience with dovecot has always been pleasantly surprising. doveadm in particular. Just the documentation seems less readable than it could be.

this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2026

27 points (93.5% liked)

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