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A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

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Self-hosted or personal email solutions? (lemmy.world)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I have a unique name, think John Doe, and I'm hoping to create a unique and "professional" looking email account like [email protected] or [email protected]. Since my name is common, all reasonable permutations are taken. I was considering purchasing a domain with something unique, then making personal family email accounts for [email protected] [email protected] etc.

Consider that I'm starting from scratch (I am). Is there a preferred domain registrar, are GoDaddy or NameCheap good enough? Are there prebuilt services I can just point my domain to or do I need to spin up a VPS and install my own services? Are there concerns tying my accounts to a service that might go under or are some "too big to fail"?

I can expand what hangs off the domain later, but for now I just need a way to make my own email addresses and use them with the relative ease of Gmail or others. Thanks in advance!!

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Do you have more details on your setup?

I currently selfhost mailcow on a small VPS but I would like to move the receiving part to my homelab and only use a small VPS or service like SES for sending.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

I set this up a couple years ago but I seem to remember AWS walking me through the initial setup.

First you'll need to configure your domain(s) in SES. It requires you to set some DNS records to verify ownership. You'll also need to configure your SPF record(s) to allow email to be sent through SES. They provide you with all of this information.

Next, you'll need to configure SES credentials or it won't accept mail from your servers. From a security standpoint, if you have multiple SMTP servers I would give each a unique set of credentials but you can get away with one for simplicity.

Finally you'll need to configure your MTA to relay through SES. If you use postfix here's a quick guide: https://medium.com/@cloudinit/sending-emails-with-postfix-and-amazon-ses-2341489a97e2

I've got postfix configured on each of my VPS servers, plus and internal relay, to relay all mail through SES. To the best of my knowledge it's worked fine. I haven't had issues with mail getting dropped or flagged as SPAM.

There is a cost, but with my email volumes (which are admittedly low) it costs me 2-3 cents a month.