I know there are alternatives like proton mail, tutamail, mailbox.org, etc… But what would be the issue if I create an email using my personal domain, stored in my hosting… maybe encryption? It seems that no-one even consider this option, but I am not sure why…
What would you suggest?
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Owning a domain for yourself and having a provider send/receive email on your behalf is a common choice, and it has its own benefits such as being able to migrate to other providers easily. As long as you renew your domain properly, it should be fine. Though do note that only you would use that domain, so anyone would know it was you who sent that email.
Owning a domain for yourself AND handling email sending/receiving can be challenging because there’s a chance your email gets filtered as spam, and the receiver doesn’t get what you sent. It’s also possible that your server goes down, and the email sent to you doesn’t arrive properly, though the email server usually try to send again a number of times before giving up.
If you are confident about setting a server, I can personally recommend Mailcow. As long as you set up SPF, DKIM, DMARC, it should pass most spam filter including Gmail. If you don’t want to deal with the potential headache, getting a provider to send/receive emails for you is a good choice too.
Thanks for the clear explanation!!! 🙌
I managed to get my mails through 95% of servers I’ve tried, and after evaluating the 5% that didn’t accept my mail, I just realized they can suck my man-tits. But maybe those 5% in your case might be recipients you value.
Which 5%
German hoster united internet. The few people I know with those addresses receive a signal message.
I hosted my own for a while. We could never send to gmail though and they are saddly too important.
I’ve read this with concerning frequency, was SPF/DMARC/DKIM all in order? I also have to question if it was a matter of IP reputation, since shared hosting IP ranges are usually pretty thrashed.
I rent mailbox services (for a custom domain) from a local ISP and don’t have problems with deliverability as such.
Those were in order (it was 15 years ago so i don’t recall if all existed but at least some did). Probably ip range but who knows
That worked like a charm for me, but some strange German mall hoster demanded the blood of an unborn unicorn or something like that for it to work.
Get your own domain. Don’t host your own.
I’ve had the same domain on gmail, proton and now purelymail.
Mailcow
I’ve done this for years.
One of the benefits is that you can always just set up Gmail to pull from Pop and send with SMTP anytime if you’re not ready to give up Gmail yet and then just turn it off when you are without the need to announce a change in email.
POP…!?
one more reason why self hosted email just isn’t competitive with free/cheap cloud email is the client UX. Gmail is very feature rich while your self hosted email will likely run on RoundCube or SquirrelMail which are extremely barebones.
there is a lot to hosting mail. Reading about it, like this book will educate you about all that’s involved.So, giving that I am an “average user”, do you think it would be bad to use my Bluehost unlimited storage? I have to pay that anyway, because I have couple of personal website there…
Or maybe there are better solutions for hosting as well…
If you are willing to study the subject and become advanced at it, go for it. Otherwise, use an existing mail service, possibly with your own domain, but stay away from the mail protocols and requirements.
Do you have Bluehost web hosting plan? In that case, Bluehost would do the most heavy lifting regarding the derliverability. Email deliverability with big hosts like that shouldn’t be a problem.
To give some context, the special edition of that book has a different title that hints at how very challenging it is to get it right when you host your own server.
Typically, it’s much better to own a domain and pair it with FastMail or other reputable email provider.
I use Addy.io with my own domain. The reason is that I don’t want to depend on Addyio.
Rolling your own email is a pain. That said, I use a VPS and host my own server with domain name and site for $5/month. Setting it up was a pain, but once you get all the records right so you’re not considered spam, it works really well. That said, I haven’t done anything with webmail; I strictly use IMAP and SMTP.
grab a personal domain, setup smtp through proton then have your local mail client archive via imap
email is the only service i would never self-host directly.
But why?
email is incredibly complicated to host yourself successfully due to security, dns requirements. i have a pretty good handle on how to do it, but i havent since ~ 2015 because of the constant upkeep and challenges from the email ecosystem at large.
It’s not THAT bad. Certainly more complicated than before. I don’t think it requires that much upkeep. But this time around it took around 1 month to get it stable. Then I’m coasting for the time being.
But yes, unless you have a specific use case or strong desire, dont.
Email is so important. If you don’t have a stable way to do it and something goes down, you’re SOL and you are responsible
…and as solutions we have many companies who will do it all for you for $5/mo (more or less), the cost of running a basic cloud server. My time and energy in making sure my email is “always good” is worth paying $5/mo to let Fastmail handle the chore. $0.02
But why support the Nazi sympathizer?
Where did you dig this up?
completely debatable if you dig into it, which i have.
Do enlighten us all.
heres a good in-depth writeup of how a single tweet was blown up by people with an agenda, or a general failure to critically think about words:
believe what you want to believe of course.
I can read his tweet. It makes absolutely no sense as his words are the literal opposite of what is really happening right in front of everyone’s eyes. The only explanation is he is sucking up to the party that is dismantling our democracy for his own financial gain.
He stands to gain nothing from this. This is a swizz company.
The other user already shared some article with lots of historical data, both words and actions, that should give a better picture. Anyway, since you decided to ignore all that, then there is also to say that the tweet was a speculation made months ago on a topic where nothing happened yet (or at least, I haven’t read any news about antitrust in the last month). I don’t think anything will happen, but anyway that makes it at most naive.
You can point your domain on any hoster like mailbox.org. There are a lot of benefits at not hosting your own mailserver.
A major downside is that email is not encrypted and Email usually contains very sensitive personal information.
I’ve been using my own cloud-hosted SMTP relay and Zimbra server for over a decade now, and I love it.
There can be a bit of a learning curve, and in some cases sites won’t accept mail from cloud-hosted domains. I add those domains to a rule in sendmail that sends those domains through Amazon SES, and then they get accepted.
If you do go this route, just make sure that your recovery emails or 2FA for things like your registrar go somewhere else. If your cloud provider pulls the plug on you or something you don’t want to be stuck waiting for an email that can’t arrive.
I love the level of control that I have over my email and wouldn’t have it any other way.
tl;dr: steep learning curve, but worth it in the long run. Keep gmail as a recovery/2FA account or something, though.
What benefits do you get from selfhosting?
I bought a domain through cloud flare qand use them for dns, I use Fastmail as my mail service.
Fairly simple setup.
Same, except I bought the domain through namecheap
Same, but with tuta for service. It works fine.
I didn’t go with tuta or proton because they require a 3rd party plugin and part of my use case is playing https://triplea-game.org/
Does Proton bridge work? I know nothing about that game.
Prooooobably but I was also working with other users who are tech illiterate and setting up even an app password for a mail client is almost a bridge too far, so another plugin/program is asking them a lot unfortunately.
If I need encryption I can encrypt locally and utilize traditional encryption methods.
Wait, is everyone using the same account or something? Why don’t they just use whatever email account they already use?
Proton just sends and accepts regular, unencrypted email, which is totally fine for something like a casual game. Whether you use Proton or something else is irrelevant, all that matters is that your end works.
I’m not the only user of my domain, I have other users.
I don’t want to use Google.
My use case unfortunately meant proton and Tutanoa did not work.
When you say hosting do you mean yourself or a company?
If a company, I do this with Dreamhost. Email hosting comes with web hosting. I might as well.
It’s been a while since I last looked but I haven’t read anything about whether they read my mail or not. They definitely could though.
Also their email spam filters are not very good.
I bought a domain name and got a web host. I set the index page to be blank and only use the web host for email. It works well. I still have gmail but try to move everything to my own domain email.
stored in my hosting…
This, specifically, is the issue people are warning you about. Yes, your hosting account from Bluehost has the ability to handle email, but it’s not great. It’s really there just so the server can send admin emails and such, not support a full email architecture.
Simplifying - part of the way spam is detected by the servers that receive an email is to check the IP address from where it came from against a list of IP addresses known to deliver spam. If it’s coming from a spam IP, the message is likely spam, so they either put it in the recipient’s spam folder or fail to deliver it entirely.
Now, you may think you don’t need to be worried because you’re an upstanding web citizen and would never send out spam messages. However, your hosting is on a shared server, with anywhere from a handful to dozens and dozens of not hundreds of other hosting accounts, all sharing the same IP address, and they have this email ability as well. If any one of them, intentionally or unintentionally, sends out a bunch of spam messages and gets your IP address flagged, the entire server loses its reputation for some period of time. Most of the time, this is caused by people not keeping their website security up to date and their site getting infected. The malicious code then goes and sends out as many spam emails as it can before the hosting company shuts things down.
Unfortunately, you end up having very little control over the situation.
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You can ask your hosting provider to do something about your malicious/ incompetent neighbor, but they may or may not.
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You can ask to be moved to a new server, but that’s just playing neighbor roulette.
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If you are able to get your hosting provider to do something about your neighbor, the other email servers in the world are still going to distrust receiving emails from your IP address for some period of time. You can make requests to try and have your IP address unflagged, that they may or may not do.
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Even if you do all the leg work of getting your server unflagged, one of your stupid neighbors could immediately get the server flagged again.
So, as others have said - yes, you can use your hosting account as your email server. But considering it’s only a few bucks a month to have a dedicated email service handle it, it’s generally not worth the hassle and headache.
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