Selfhosted

After spending a considerable amount of time on it, I have come to the conclusion that there is no completely reliable way to send email without relying on a third party that is considered to have a “good reputation”.

Your set up might work right now, but tomorrow everyone on the internet could stop accepting your mail without explanation and without recourse.

If you own your own IP range, things look a bit brighter, but if you’re dependent on residential and housing provider addresses, you’re boned.

ProtonMail. 100%.

I set up custom DNS and catchall so yourcompanyname@saltycowboy.org is really how I filter spam.

Please note, saltycowboy.org isn't really my domain.

unless you realllllly enjoy self hosting your email, IMO it’s just not worth it anymore with the state of things. I use Fastmail and could not be happier.

I use fastmail, and I enjoy it a lot. Their masked email is very nice as well, and integrates with bitwarden. So quite convenient to use my personal domain for stuff where my identity matters, and use masked @fastmail addresses for more disposable stuff.

The only thing that ticks me a tiny bit is that their mobile app doesn't have offline mode; but you can use imap client or w/e, so it's not too much of an issue.

Also hear good things about protonmail; I would consider it if I didn't already use/trust fastmail.

im an old school email admin. i gave up on my personal exchange box for protonmail years ago.. multiple domains, lots of dns nonsense on my part. zero problems.

i highly recommend them.

https://mxroute.com/ is what I went with. They have a $99 lifetime plan. Semi limited, but worth it imho.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

8 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 3 acronyms.

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I use mailcow for self hosting.

Nowadays I'd recommend a simple postfix + dovecot setup. If you care about a web-UI and possibly some groupware functions put SOGo on top.

Just switch to mail in a box.

I found myself in a similar situation last year. MXRoute's lifetime plan works well for those domains that just need basic email and not a lot of storage.

Fasmail + domain

I have used https://migadu.com/ for over a year now with no problems. Very happy with them. Setup is well documented.

I use docker-mailserver with sendgrid as smtp relay

Protonmail. That's what I use connected to my own domain.

Personally using Ionos.
Not bad experiences so far but you need to watch out at times and check your invoices.

Moved from a junky setup where I was forwarding my domain mail to gmail. And sending mail through gmail using the smtp server provided by my web host.

I was having too many issues.

I switched to fastmail. It is quite good. And you can get some free basic web hosting included with your paid service.

Oh no! I'm sad to see that you've run into troubles :(.

There are other "fully put together" solutions like mailinabox and mailcow, that could be worth looking into for you. I haven't used them personally, but you might find them worth looking into. I'd never heard of mailu before, actually.

Totally understand the desire to just move to a hosted solution after running into these problems, but even if you do that I think you should keep running a mail server in the back of your mind for the future

you've already learned a lot about it I'm sure, and maybe with a bit more experience you'll be ready to tackle it again :).

I don't actually use any of the fully assembled solutions like mailinabox, and I wonder if in the future it might be a good idea to try configuring everything manually. You already have some familiarity with how mail works at this point, and having more control over the setup and how everything fits together might actually work out for you. Personally I'm running an OpenSMTPD + Dovecot mailserver and having a great time. I'd recommend it.

https://poolp.org/posts/2019-09-14/setting-up-a-mail-server-with-opensmtpd-dovecot-and-rspamd/

Either way, I think you should keep using a custom domain for e-mail because then you have options in the future :).

I use iRedMail but would I call it simple? No. Mail is such old tech that simple really isn't the word for it. Archaic, ancient and dying fits better. But it will take decades more to actually die. iRedMail is available as a single container, which isn't correct from a container perspective but makes everything a lot easier in my opinion. Of the various solutions I've tried it's the one closest to the goal of "It just works". The biggest downside is the manual steps often needed to upgrade version. Not to time consuming but far from "It just works".

I hosted email professionally for over a decade... and I can't recommend getting back into the business. At that time we were using Qmail, although I also have experience managing Exim and Postfix. About 90% of incoming email remains spam.

For outgoing email for things like server cron mail, a stub service like msmtpdcan be used to receive local mail and forward it to to a local service.

To receive and host email, Fastmail is good.

Throwing my hat in for Protonmail.

Yes https://cloudron.io + Contabo

I vote for maddy, but one important note for my setup: my family uses always-on VPN, so i only open port 25 for the world. Imap can be accessed only from vpn. In such case server can't be used as relay from internet. Maybe try that way?

Mailcow dockerized.