I give up.
I tried left and right to try to install an email server so I could degoogle my life.
But therechnical barrier is thick and Google keeps adding more to it. Forget it. I can’t even get thru the installation process much less trying to get my shit off Google.
I figure, I don’t actually have any need for my email addresses. Just like my phone number. I never call anyone. I’m going to discourage my kids from using email at all. I’ll remind everyone I know that I don’t use email at every opportunity I get just like I remind people to not call me and that my phone number is not available.
Between spammers and Google, I just don’t need this headache in my life. My mom is much less technically savvy than the average pet. So Google will just siphon her data and when the megabits are full then you just delete the old stuff.
You don’t need it. No one will spend their life reading your emails when you’re gone or watching your videos or listening to your recordings or viewing your photos. There’s no need to worry about just deleting the pile of shit you’ve accumulated. I’m this done.
You don’t need your own email server to degoogle your life.
Yes selfhosting it is awesome but it’s definitely not the simplest service to do host.
I think what OP means is that you can mix using an external email provider with storing your own email archive + an IMAP server + a webmail app. You can let the provider deal with the IP reputation and all that pain and just use their SMTP and IMAP to send email and pull to your local server, respectively. If you use your own domain you can also switch the provider in 10 minutes by simply changing your DNS records and retain the same address.
The hard part for me when giving up Gmail wasn’t the stuff above, it was tracking down all the places I was subscribed as @gmail.com and replacing it with @my.domain addresses. That took about 6 months. The local pull + IMAP + webmail took a weekend to set up.
I don’t self-host email but I don’t use my own domain to have control over it. Look into FastMail and a custom domain. That’s the happy path.
People repeat and repeat that email is hard but it’s a legend. I have been self hosting for years on a residential ip and a random domain and it just works
I self hosted for many years but gave up due to family members complaining about the occasional rejection. You are made of stronger stuff than I am, kudos.
You were ambitious providing it for your family
Given I don’t need too much privacy for generic E-Mails (I use my Tuta mail address for that) I’m using purelymail with advanced pricing for ~5€/year. (If I cared more about privacy in emails I’d use Tuta for 3€/month)
I just checked out Posteo and Purelymail but one question lingers… How do I get all my emails out of their servers immediately as I get them and into a centrally accessible server that I can use to search thru my email from any device and accumulate more than just 3gb or 4gb or 15gb or whatever the next service’s limitations might be?
The reason I shouldn’t serve my own is because we have blackouts during storms so if I was traveling I wouldn’t be able to access things that would require email confirmation as a 2nd factor. That’s one reason for example.
But yeah I would like to have many devices be able to access the same emails thru a webmail client.
I haven’t played with email extraction to my own server yet (their server is perfectly syncing my devices and has basic searching) but regarding limits: Purelymail’s advanced pricing is 4€/year + usage (very fair prices for usage). So you aren’t hitting limits. Theres a calculator on their advanced pricing site that lets you input numbers and tells you how much you’d pay.
Short answer: IMAP and the
mbsynctool (aka “isync”). It can sync between two IMAP accounts or between IMAP and local storage (either/both ways).If you just want syncing between two IMAP accounts there’s also
imapsync, which is available both as a program and as an online service run by the guy who maintains the program, priced as “pay what you want”, which can migrate your inbox on the fly to another service.What I’ve done myself is to run mbsync periodically (made myself a custom Alpine image with cron and mbsync) to bring emails over. Added an IMAP server container on top of the local copy of the emails (tons of options, Dovecot is popular). Added a webmail app behind reverse proxy, talking to the IMAP server on a private docker network (Roundcube). And a Borg Backup job to take an extra backup (incremental, deduplicated and encrypted) of the email archive.
In theory I could also connect the webmail to the SMTP of whatever email provider I’m currently using and be able to use it to also send. I don’t do that because I have email clients connected to the provider on both desktop and phone so it’s not a requirement, but I could if I wanted to.
This approach lets me periodically trim down the emails stored at the provider to only the most recent. This lets me also use providers that offer small amounts of storage. My recent emails are available instantly through IMAP to the provider. Starting within last 24h and going back forever they’re available at the archive webmail.
I can switch email providers at any time as fast as DNS records propagate (because I use @my.own.domains) and as fast as I can update the IMAP/SMTP credentials for my phone/desktop/mbsync.
Posteo is a good provider for 1usd per month.
If you want to give it another try, I’ve used Mailcow for about a decade now, after running on Exchange for twenty before that. Mailcow is way easier to set up and maintain than Exchange.
Key to it all is making sure you have your DKIM, dmarc and SPF records set up correctly, as well as a PTR with your internet provider if you can manage it, though that seems optional.
Never had a problem with the big providers bouncing my mails, just a couple little outfits that couldn’t figure their filters out correctly.
That’s the first thing I tried. I could receive emails but not send. Maybe I’ll give that thing one more go.
If you have trouble with outgoing mails, you can use a hybrid approach.
Receive mails directly to your server but use a mail service to relay your outgoing mails. Configuration for that is very simple in mailcow and there are a few dozen (free) transactional email providers (e.g. Scaleway).
That way you can keep receiving your mails privately and only have to give up some privacy when sending mails.
If you’re new to it all, this is probably the safest approach. Getting mail isn’t hard, sending it is where the potential gotchas will getcha.
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.
Thanks for introducing me to posteo, was looking for something to leave proton for
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 did try this. It’s pretty easy up to the point where you need to do SSL or connect to Gmail.
To go to IMAP with GMAIL now you have to register as a Developer, you have to create a project and then create a key for that project once those things are created??? Where do they go? Heavens knows.
All of these, even if you get them to work today, Google can just break them tomorrow and you won’t know until maybe a few days without emails have passed?
Ah Now I understand the issue. Most people are complaining about mail in general but this is just Google being google. Alright, good luck!
weird to see someonengetting worked up about a service he barely uses and sending little data by default.
Hell is other people. My wife opens her new phone and says! Hey why am I running out of space already! See my gmail says I got no more space!
I tried syncthing and it was great for a while. Now I got an rsync script that I gotta run from time to time.
But wouldn’t it be great if The email just came off the bastards and into my own central server instead? That’s what I’ve been trying hard to do. I’m just not hitting the ball on this one. Mailcow, mailserver, stalwart, and a good other bunch. I always just get stuck in some part of the installation or end up with issues sending or receiving. But thinking about it, if I have issues, she’s going to have issues. So it’s not even worth it.
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.
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.
Dismail.de is a long-time professional that does this as a hobby on donations (but they don’t take any new users currently). Why i mention them is, they’ve made a comparison table. Maybe out of date, but it gives you a glance in what you have to care for if you selfhost E-Mail.A decade? Email has been around longer than the web. Roughly forty years.
Ok, two decades.
As much as I would like 1981 to only be two decades ago, I’m afraid it was four and a half decades ago.
I dunno, mailcow dockerized seems to work ok for me. That being said, e-mail is so 20th century.
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 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.
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.
Yep honestly paying for posteo (fully foss back-end) is worth it. Self-hosting email is on the hardest side, not impossible but require more time and knowledge than many other services.
