Never self host email. It's way too much of a pain.

Fair enough - I got it working recently but it was the hardest self-hosting install I've done. No way most people would succeed. Email is 50(?) years of questionable design decisions piled on top of each other so it's become a whole world of weird stuff. Doing email should be it's own tech specialty, like 'devops' or 'db admin' is. There's enough depth to it.

There are a ton of email providers who are not Google, though. e.g. https://proton.me/mail. You don't need to run it on your own hardware.

What is the problem? I have been self hosting my mail for the last 20+ years and has always worked pretty well.

I rent a VPS for that since you should not use a residential address for email servers.

If you are careful enough to configure it properly I assure you that it works and it's perfectly usable and stable

All my family primary email addresses are managed in that way on my various domains and we never had a single issue

Today it's even easier because there are all in one docker based solutions. But going the hard way is perfectly doable as well.

Here is my experience, on my wiki, if you are interested https://wiki.gardiol.org/doku.php?id=email%3Astart

Be aware that there are no optional steps: everything must be properly installed and setup from DNS entries to dkim/dmarc and certificates. But I promise, maintenance it basically zero after a proper setup. And I think twice in 20 years something broke. And the nice part of that email will just be delayed and delivered after you fix it, nothing gets ever lost

I love email, with all it downfalls, it's still one of the most resilient and solid stuff on the internet.

This really saddens me. Email is such a fundamentally good and open protocol. The only reason people don’t like it is because of big tech’s shenanigans.

I run an email service called Port87. I invite you to try it and see if it can convince you that email is actually a great technology, when detached from big tech slop. It’s got some really killer features that make it great for organization and preventing spam. You can also tell it that on certain addresses, it should completely ignore the strict auth requirements it usually has, so it will accept email from your own services without you having to set up all the extra bullshit that’s meant for stuff that matters more.

Running your own email server is easy.

Getting your email accepted by other servers is hard.

Hosting anything publicly requires a significant amount of hardening.

Neither of those two tasks are easy or low maintenance. I self host almost everything and I’ve run my own mail server (with occasional rejection). It’s not worth it for me; I now use a commercial, paid provider for email.

I prefer to follow the advice from people who actually set up and maintain email servers: “Fucking don’t. It’s not worth it.”

Just get a custom domain and run it through an existing email provider.

I outsourced my email to a provider.
Works great and only costs me 8€ per month for not having to wrestle IP spamlists, mailserver maintenance and reachability.

I moved to https://mxroute.com/ and payed $15 for three years of hosting because they had some promotion.

Yeah, hosting your own email server is pretty tough.

I think something like https://migadu.com/ might be more in the middle of hosting your own server and purely using someone else's frontend.

I like email.

I pay for my own domain. I pay a privacy focused European provider for email and they let me use my own domain. I use an European DNS provider.

So I have email addresses with my own domain and the setup is pretty straightforward and I can use webmail or a desktop|mobile client.

Proton or Tuta mail. Supports aliasing so you can make unique email addresses per website, and trash them if you get spammed.

Singing up for a paid account you also get VPN, drive storage, password manager, docs, sheets, AI chat (I know), calendar, meetings and authenticator.

i get it. i ran my own server for 15 years... and i stopped ~ 8 years ago. it was just too annoying between the spam filtering and -todays-new-security-enhancement-

email is the one service im happy to pay someone to do.. from a bunker in switzerland. google not required.

...but you cant not use email and function in the technological world of today. email isnt about communication any longer. its about security and authentication.

just get a trustworthy hoster and a good client application. Boom, most of the benefits with none of the headache.

And yeah, E-Mail is, what a decade of expanding scope does to you.

Just use mailbox.org or posteo.de . Using one of those providers is so much better than a Google mail address but so easier than hosting your own mail server.

It's not really worth the trouble to try to host your own e-mail. There are lots of e-mail hosts that you can use with your own domain. A few of them are free and there are plenty of low cost ones. As long as you use your own domain, you can switch hosts whenever you want and keep your addresses.

Personally I don't self-host email :

• For personal emails, I use posteo.de
• For accounts, I use alias vault

You don't have to use Gmail. There are many, many other options.

Just get a domain and point it at a provider. Now you're not locked in and can switch at will upon enshittification. Get one of the offline mail archive services like OpenArchiver. Job done.

I rage guit my email server long ago. True, as evidenced in this thread, there are some who successfully run their own email server and that's awesome. I am quite jealous. I too gave up, but I went with a small EU based company. It's no frills, just the basics. I don't send/receive a lot of email, so I don't need all the bells and whistles. If you're de-googling your life, you don't have to specifically run your own email service. I do hear a lot of positives about MailCow tho.

Posteo is a good provider for 1usd per month.

Self host all the services you want, but don't ever touch sendmail and bind. The most constantly attacked services I've ever had my ass on the line for. I won't even manage them for money anymore.

Have you tried https://mailcow.email/

Its dockerized and preconfigured and cones with tools to manage. I am happy and I never wanted to touch mail.

I used to run my own mailserver, but I haven't in years now since it was so much of a pain. Not even the set-up part; that wasn't the worst thing in the world. It's uptime, back-ups, and other considerations that just require time and money I don't have.

I'd try Maddy if I were going to setup my personal email server now. But I already have postfix/dovecot/all-that-shit up and running for years.

Damn I been using Gmail since the invite days. How does one even transfer their Gmail account? Best case to just set a POP service or mail forwarding to a new one?

I mean I did an email transfer as a multihat guy at a small business and mx records are a bitch. granted more so because there needs to be no loss or delay. might be easier for an individual. but I don't roll my own.

What is a good, paid email service that is

1. Not expensive
2. Can be payed wity crypto
3. Can use my own domain

?

I dunno, mailcow dockerized seems to work ok for me. That being said, e-mail is so 20th century.

https://hub.docker.com/r/mailserver/docker-mailserver/

It just works. Once you got it working.