I’ve recently been trying to degoogle myself, and in doing so I’m going to need another email. I tried ProtonMail, but apparently only business accounts can use SMTP, even though their features claim SMTP access. I’m plenty fine paying for the service, but going from the $6/month to $12/month just to get notification emails from my server doesn’t seem worth it to me. I’ve not looked into what all else comes with Proton’s Business features, but i’m not really running a business or trying to start one up.
What do you use? do you like it? How’s the cost/features?
Email is the one thing I don’t bother self hosting.
You need to use an existing host with reputation or most of your emails will end up in junk or be outright blocked.
Fastmail.
But, it’s not the cheapest. $5 a month gets what you need though.
Really quick WebUI, great features, including hosting your own domains and smtp rewriting.
Very smart helpful support team.
Great for degoogling.
I self host using mailcow. Easy setup. Prevents most of the beginner pitfalls via exemplary documentation.
Upvote for mailcow. It’s a classic postfix+dovecot email stack with lots of stuff figured out for you already. I host on a cheap vps that supports SRV records so rDNS passes, and then I still route my outgoing mail through Mailgun for better IP reputation. At my low (normal) mailing levels Mailgun is free.
I use Mail in a Box running on a digital Ocean instance for like 12 USD a month.
Second mail in a box. Works well and has done for over 6 years.
Can you selfhost? Does you ISP allow you to host a mail server? (and there is a difference between what they say, and what they actually do.)
I use iRedMail as a complete solution which is a mailserver, complete with server management and webclients sogo and icube.
The problem you may run into is if your ISP actively submits its customer email subnets to sites like Spamhaus. But if you dont get IP changes very often this might not be a problem. However you do also need to have a domain in your control and know how to do DKIM and SPF
I ended up using an old hotmail account I had laying around after protonmail and gmail failed me for SMTP access to notify myself of server issues.
I’m hosting mine on two VPS running OpenBSD :
- opensmtpd
- opendkim
- dovecot
- spamd
- spamassassin
- roundcube (webmail)
- mlmmj (for newsletters)
Setup is rock solid and hasn’t failed me in the last couple years, since I added the secondary server to temporarily queue mails in case the primary goes down.
spamd
can be a bit inconvenient sometimes (but that’s on purpose) and I have a script to disable it temporarily when I need a quick email.I have SPF, DKIM and DMARC setup on my DNS too, as well as requires records like A and PTR for my hosts.
As for the cost, I pay 30$/year for the domain, and 10$/month for the 2 servers. Backup is on backblaze and ridiculously cheap for the amount of mails I backup.
$10/year gets you what you need from Purelymail. https://purelymail.com I have used them for the last year or so and the service is fast and near real time with messages hitting my inbox (I use Thunderbird to download my mail).
I also just recently switched to https://purelymail.com after hosting my own for several years via Mailcow and a cheap VPS. The cheap VPS was more expensive than the $10/year for Purelymail and I was only using it for mail anyway. Nothing to maintain now and so far very happy with how easy it was to move everything over.
Also, they don’t charge extra for additional domains so if you have multiple it’s still $10. Only been with them a few weeks so can’t say much yet for long term, but great so far!
I’ve been using them for a few years now. Always good and reliable. My wife and I both have accounts on a custom domain from them.
I was using smtp2go, I’m now testing purelymail for my personal email needs. I don’t think the latter is suited for sending a large number of emails.
I use my domain name with iCloud+ mail. I self hosted the domain for almost a decade and it’s just easier paying for hosting. I have done it on both O365 and Gmail but they have both nerfed the ability to use custom domains so iCloud it is.
I have mine running through Polaris Mail. The domain cost me around $5 for the year (renewal is $10 IIRC), and I’m running the Y25 plan for $25/yr which has been big enough for me. SMTP is included, and there is a web interface, but I haven’t really used that, T-bird and K9 take care of my needs.
I used to run my own email for years. Started on qmail, postfix+dovecot. Anti-spam (spamassassin for a while, rspamd), spf+dkim+dmarc, srs, arc-signing for forwards. All kinds of other tools, even wrote some of my own. I’ve learned a lot and pretty much ran the gamut to be honest.
So all that said, nowadays I just host with mxroute. Bought a lifetime plan. There’s features it doesn’t have but it’s good enough to get emails and a lot easier than self hosting.
I generally recommend finding a host that has the features you want at a price that seems fair. Email is the kind of thing that needs to just always work.
Once you set it up sure, it’s rock solid. Until one day you realize your emails are getting dropped and there’s some new thing you’ve gotta look into. Let somebody else handle it.
+1 on MXRoute and lifetime plan. It has been solid for me. The unlimited domains is also icing on the cake. I haven’t even gotten close to 10 gigs but once I do I’ll just transfer all the emails with attachments locally and keep chugging along.
I self host through my ISP connection.
- sendmail
- bogofilter
- bogofilter-milter
- opendkim
- Cyrus for POP3/IMAP
- roundcube
I have static IP and needed to get a business plan to obtain it. I am actually wondering if there’s place where I can set up a tunnel (that would work with freebsd) and then I could use cheaper, customer based plan.
My problem is to get something that wasn’t abused by spammers. I don’t plan to send any advertising, it would be low volume, since it is just for my and my family.
Is a Dynamic DNS not an option for you? Most residential plans keep their IP for months if not years, only really changing if the model drops for long periods of time.
Well there’s small chance someone else could get your mail, also there’s a reputation of given IP + there are blacklists that list dynamic IP ranges and some servers outright block them. And last one, you can’t set your own reverse DNS, which could increase like hood ending up in spam folder.