Self-hosted or personal email solutions?

I have a unique name, think John Doe, and I’m hoping to create a unique and “professional” looking email account like johndoe@gmail.com or john@doe.com. Since my name is common, all reasonable permutations are taken. I was considering purchasing a domain with something unique, then making personal family email accounts for john@mydoe.com jane@mydoe.com etc.

Consider that I’m starting from scratch (I am). Is there a preferred domain registrar, are GoDaddy or NameCheap good enough? Are there prebuilt services I can just point my domain to or do I need to spin up a VPS and install my own services? Are there concerns tying my accounts to a service that might go under or are some “too big to fail”?

I can expand what hangs off the domain later, but for now I just need a way to make my own email addresses and use them with the relative ease of Gmail or others. Thanks in advance!!

kameecoding, (edited )

Based on my personal experience, id say gmail, you only need a domain I used namecheap without any issue. You register with that on google, some settings you set on namecheap , it guides you all the way then you pay the lowest monthly fee, I pay 5.20 euros per month for my company’s mail.

You set up a main email then you can setup any number of aliases for yourself I think, you can also create group emails and assign yourself to it

grepe,

I tried both hosting my own mail server and using a paid mail hosting with my own domain and I advise against the former.

The reason not to roll out your own mail server is that your email might go to spam at many many common mail services. Servers and domains that don’t usually send out big amount of email are considered suspicious by spam filters and the process of letting other mail servers know that they are there by sending out emails is called warming them up. It’s hard and it takes time… Also, why would you think you can do hosting better than a professional that is paid for that? Let someone else handle that.

With your own domain you are also not bound to one provider - you can change both domain registrar and your email hosting later without changing your email address.

Also, avoid using something too unusual. I went with firstname@lastname.email cause I thought it couldn’t be simpler than that. Bad idea… and I can’t count how many times people send mail to a wrong address because such tld is unfamiliar. I get told by web forms regularly that my email is not a valid address and even people that got my email written on a piece of paper have replaced the .email with .gmail.com cause “that couldn’t be right”…

SeeJayEmm,
@SeeJayEmm@lemmy.procrastinati.org avatar

I get told by web forms regularly that my email is not a valid address and even people that got my email written on a piece of paper have replaced the .email with .gmail.com cause “that couldn’t be right”…

That’s the thing that holds me back from a non-standard TLD, as much as I’d love to get a vanity domain.

I’ve got a .org I’ve had for over 20 years now. My primary email address has been on that domain for almost as long. While I don’t have problems with web-based forms, telling people my email address is a chore at best since it’s not gmail, outlook, yahoo, etc…

CosmicTurtle,

More and more services are REQUIRING a gmail/outlook/etc. account simply because bots/scammers bombard their services. It’s their cheap captcha.

I’m seeing it more and more and it infuriates me to no end.

helenslunch,

I don’t give my personal email address to literally anyone. Everyone gets an alias.

Once someone gets your personal email address and leaks it, there is no way to stop spam. You cannot delete your personal address because it is your account identity.

Firefox Relay, AnonAddy, SimpleLogin, all great services.

I have a business email address that I’m just unfortunately stuck digging through spam.

Anon383,

I do this. Personally I use cloudflaire for my domain and dns, not that I’m committed to them it’s just what I use. I then use protonmail for my email and point the relivent records to them.

Moonrise2473,

Purchase the domain with cloudflare, for email it depends how you use it:

With an email client like thunderbird:

A cheap service like mxroute is perfect

If you need to use a webmail:

You need to pay a lot because the free webmails are all unusable for advanced use.

Good options:

  • Zoho at $1 per user per month
  • Exchange with ovh at €3 per user per month

Bad options:

  • Google workspace at $10 per month per user plus the blood rights for your firstborn and pray that they don’t alter the deal
  • proton pro at $9 per user per month but IMHO is extremely overrated for what they offer at their price point (unless you need end to end encryption when emailing other proton users)
BlueBockser,

+1 for own domain and some email hosting service. That also makes it pretty easy to switch providers because you can simply point your MX records etc. somewhere else - no need to change the actual email address.

I can also recommend mailbox.org as an alternative to mxroute, they’re even a little cheaper at $3/month (mxroute is $49/year at minimum).

trewq, (edited )

You may want to check lowendtalk. Jar (mxroute owner) run promo over there, at least once a year.

His last black friday link below. lowendtalk.com/discussion/190301/…/p1

His black friday page still up too. mxroute.blackfriday

Cheapest is $15/3 years for 10GB.

I’ve been using his service for years with no issue, and my account is grandfathered plan ($10/year for 50GB)

Non affiliate beside being their customers for years.

Confound4082,

I don’t know current pricing, but a premium proton account, which was ~$9/month when I started has worked very well for me. I like the other features they are rolling out and use them a lot.

Domain is purchased through cloudflare, and I think it was like $10/year?

lemmyvore,

GoDaddy is notorious for terrible service and NameCheap has started doing some shady stuff too lately. Luckily there are other decent registrars out there. I can recommend Netim.com or INWX.de in the EU – they also provide EU-specific TLDs which American registrars don’t.

If you need more than one mailbox you can’t beat the offers from providers like PurelyMail/MXRoute/Migadu, where you pay for the storage instead of per-mailbox. I’m using Migadu because, again, they work under EU/Swiss privacy laws.

Here are some more providers if you’re interested in taking advantage of EU privacy: european-alternatives.eu/…/email-providers

You do not need to spin up your own mail service and should not. Email and DNS hosting are the most abuse-prone and easy to mess up services; always go to an established provider for these.

Are there concerns tying my accounts to a service that might go under or are some “too big to fail”?

Look into their history. Generally speaking a provider that’s been around for a decade or more probably won’t dissapear overnight; they probably have a sustainable income model and have been around the block.

That being said nothing saves even long-established providers from being acquired. This happened for example to a French service (Gandi) with over 20 years of history.

The only answer to that is to pick providers that don’t lock you into proprietary technologies and offer standard services like IMAP, and also to keep your domain+DNS and your email providers separate. This way if the email service starts hiking prices or does anything funny you can copy your email, switch your domain(s), and be with another provider the very next day.

overcast5348,

What did namecheap do? I’ve got a bunch of domains with them. 🤦‍♂️

Cowabunghole,

Just throwing in my two cents since I just went through this same ordeal: I use Proton, but be aware that you can only use a custom address if you pay for the premium plan which is not crazy cheap. I’ve been pretty happy with their premium plan so far, which includes premium features for mail, calendar, cloud drive, VPN, and password manager, but if I ever decide that I don’t want to keep paying for it, I can always transfer my custom domain to a different provider without needing to update my email.

As for the domain, I went with namecheap. I also have a pretty common name, so the good domains were taken and I had to settle for firstname@lastname.in but I think it’s still pretty easy to remember.

TCB13,
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

Proton is all fun and games until you find out they don’t support IMAP/SMTP without a bridge.

lemmyvore, (edited )

And that the bridge is only available on PC – on mobile you must use their proprietary app. And they’re working on launching a proprietary desktop app, after which they’ll have no reason to offer the IMAP bridge anymore.

Cowabunghole,

Interesting. I have always used their web app (even on mobile, i just use their pwa instead of the native app since the native app is missing obvious features), and I haven’t had any issues, but I can definitely understand the frustration if you want to use anything else. OP, keep that in mind if you’re thinking about Proton!

lemmyvore,

I’ve had providers being acquired from under me several times over the last couple decades. They usually get worse after that; new owners typically want to squeeze the customers not to improve quality. That’s why I won’t use (anymore) any email service that’s not easy to migrate away from.

To achieve a reasonable level of email independence you need IMAP access, you need to use your own domain, and you need to keep your DNS service separate from the email provider.

TCB13,
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

Interesting. I have always used their web app (even on mobile, i just use their pwa instead of the native app since the native app is missing obvious features), and I haven’t had any issues, but I can definitely understand the frustration

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve nothing against you… but…

This is the irony with the privacy minded people and anti-google / monopoly folks around here - they can’t use Google and Microsoft because of the monopoly and then use a solution that is 10x more closed and doesn’t even has an option to use standard protocols and email clients. Logic ham ? :P

7Sea_Sailor,

Lots of people have said worthwhile things. Don’t selfhost email for example. While going with an email hoster has been recommended a couple times, which is good and easy, I want to offer an alternative: SimpleLogin (or comparable providers). Essentially a “email alias generator”, it forwards received emails to one or more mail addresses (Google, Hotmail, what have you). It also allows you to connect a domain and then create new inboxes on the fly by simply sending (or telling a service to send) an email to that non-existing inbox. Which is incredibly handy if you’re faced with a situation that demands an email, where you don’t want to give out an actual email.

So say you have the domain doe.com, and you’re in a physical shop at the register, faced with the question if you want to get 10% off by registering for their members club. You can simply give the cashier the email “coupon_walmart@doe.com” (which does not yet exist), the email will be sent, received bei SL, the inbox created and the coupon code forwarded to your Gmail account. Afterwards, you can disable or delete the inbox and never have to worry about newsletters or data breaches. Nifty!

Every one of these boxes also has its own “sent from” address visible in your actual mail account. Which means that you can simply respond to incoming emails, and the recipient will see the mail address they sent a message to. This also means that you can set up filters in your mail account to move messages from certain sender addresses into specific labels, as if they were real separate email accounts.

bdonvr, (edited )

Use Cloudflare or PorkBun.com for cheap, no bullshit domains. As for the email host, self hosting not recommended. It’s a long battle to be not blocked by every other provider.

I recommend purelymail.com - no cost to add (even multiple!) custom domains, unlimited users, only pay for mail usage and storage. Go for advanced pricing until it starts costing you more than $10/yr. (Which it shouldn’t if it’s just you. Seriously this thing is cheap!) I just passed my one year anniversary with PurelyMail, and have spent $6 so far. This is my most expensive month, 85¢. And that’s only because I host a public Lemmy instance (small) and we had a few hundred spam signups which sends an email each time.

https://thelemmy.club/pictrs/image/5b7bd21e-1301-4186-9a9f-8821108ea519.png

This will give you a total yearly price WAY under what Google or Microsoft will give you. Google is like, $7.20/user/month.

And if for some reason that service goes down one day, as long as you still have a mail client with your email stored in it you should be able to just switch providers and import your emails from your client. Make some backups.

lemmyvore, (edited )

For anybody interested in more choices for volume-based providers like PurelyMail (with tiers based on storage and emails sent/received but who otherwise allow unlimited domains/mailboxes/aliases) there’s also MXRoute (US) and Migadu (Swiss/EU).

These providers don’t usually make sense for a single mailbox (although some of them have a low entry tier for this purpose) but can be extremely cost-efficient if you need 2 or more mailboxes/domains.

TORFdot0,

Cloudflare sells domains at cost. If you use apple devices and pay for iCloud+ ($1.99 a month for the cheapest plan), you can get email hosting for your domain for the entire family + a catch all address.

You can run an email host yourself but it is going to cost more in time and effort to maintain than just paying for hosting. It’s not very professional if your messages go to spam due to low reputation or if you miss a message/someone gets a bounce back because the container running your mail server was down and you didn’t realize

Run mail on a custom domain for fun, to learn what it takes, but don’t do it for mail that really matters

hddsx,

As someone who is once again trying to setup an email server, it’s more work than it’s worth for like 99% of people

ikidd,
@ikidd@lemmy.world avatar

Give me a ping if you need a hand, I’ve done it for decades.

LucidDaemon,

I use both. I have a self hosted docker compose instance of mailcow, which alerts me when an update is available.

I also use protonmail as well.

Self hosting was a pain in the ass to get working, but I’ve had no issues with it once up. I tossed it behind a reverse proxy to keep it from directly touching the internet.

Dehydrated,

Get a domain from Njalla, set it up with Proton Mail. That’s the best solution in my opinion. I don’t think there’s anything better for privacy.

PropaGandalf,
@PropaGandalf@lemmy.world avatar

Njalla had some big controversy regarding their reliability and trustworthiness. I’d stay away from their services.

Dehydrated,

Source?

PropaGandalf,
@PropaGandalf@lemmy.world avatar

www.trustpilot.com/review/njal.la basically a bunch of people complain that thy cant access their domain names. This is possible because njalla owns the domain for you

We’re not actually a domain name registration service, we’re a customer to these. We sit in between the domain name registration service and you, acting as a privacy shield. When you purchase a domain name through Njalla, we own it for you. However, the agreement between us grants you full usage rights to the domain. Whenever you want to, you can transfer the ownership to yourself or some other party.

I don’t want to stop anyone from using it just keep this in mind.

Dehydrated,

I’m aware how Njalla works, actually that’s the reason I use them. I don’t want my name, my payment information or anything connected to my domain. With Njalla, I don’t have to give up any data and I can pay anonymously with crypto. I’ve used it for all my domains for years and I never had any issues. They seem very trustworthy to me.

ChrislyBear,

Do NOT self-host email! In the long run, you’ll forget a security patch, someone breaches your server, blasts out spam and you’ll end up on every blacklist imaginable with your domain and server.

Buy a domain, DON’T use GoDaddy, they are bastards. I’d suggest OVH for European domains or Cloudflare for international ones.

After you have your domain, register with “Microsoft 365” or “Google Workspace” (I’d avoid Google, they don’t have a stable offering) or any other E-Mail-Provider that allows custom domains.

Follow their instructions on how to connect your domain to their service (a few MX and TXT records usually suffice) and you’re done.

After that, you can spin up a VPS and try out new stuff and connect it also to your domain (A and CNAMR records).

DeltaTangoLima,
@DeltaTangoLima@reddrefuge.com avatar

I’d avoid Google, they don’t have a stable offering

What you you mean by not stable?

I’ve been (stuck with) Google Workspace for many, many years - I was grandfathered out from the old G-Suite plans. The biggest issue for me is that all my Play store purchases for my Android are tied to my Workspace’s identity, and there’s no way to unhook that if I move.

I want to move. I have serious trust issues with Google. But I can’t stop paying for Workspaces, as it means I’d lose all my Android purchases. It’s Hotel fucking California.

But I’ve always found the email to be stable, reliable, and the spam filtering is top notch (after they acquired and rolled Postini into the service).

SeeJayEmm, (edited )
@SeeJayEmm@lemmy.procrastinati.org avatar

@avguser

I’ll second not self hosting email unless you’re in it for the experience.

I’d also strongly caution against hosting email for friends and family unless you want to own that relationship for the rest of your life.

If you do it anyway, you’re going to end up locked into whatever solution you decide for a long time, because now you have users who rely on that solution.

If you still go forward, don’t use Google (or msft). Use a dedicated email service. Having your personal domain tied to those services just further complicates the lock in.

(I did this over a decade ago, with Google, when it was just free vanity domain hosting. I’ve been trying for years to get my users migrated to Gmail accounts.)

If I had it all to do over again. I’d probably setup accounts as vanity forwards to a “real” account for people who wanted them. That’s easy to maintain, move around, and you’re not dealing with migrating peoples oauth to everything when you want to move or stop paying for it.

lily33,

That said, you can use a third party service only for sending, but receive mail on your self-hosted server.

Fisch,
@Fisch@lemmy.ml avatar

That’s what I’m doing. I have selfhosted E-Mail with YunoHost and send it through SMTP2Go.

SeeJayEmm,
@SeeJayEmm@lemmy.procrastinati.org avatar

I’ve been successfully using SES for a couple years now without issue.

domi,
@domi@lemmy.secnd.me avatar

Do you have more details on your setup?

I currently selfhost mailcow on a small VPS but I would like to move the receiving part to my homelab and only use a small VPS or service like SES for sending.

SeeJayEmm,
@SeeJayEmm@lemmy.procrastinati.org avatar

I set this up a couple years ago but I seem to remember AWS walking me through the initial setup.

First you’ll need to configure your domain(s) in SES. It requires you to set some DNS records to verify ownership. You’ll also need to configure your SPF record(s) to allow email to be sent through SES. They provide you with all of this information.

Next, you’ll need to configure SES credentials or it won’t accept mail from your servers. From a security standpoint, if you have multiple SMTP servers I would give each a unique set of credentials but you can get away with one for simplicity.

Finally you’ll need to configure your MTA to relay through SES. If you use postfix here’s a quick guide: medium.com/…/sending-emails-with-postfix-and-amaz…

I’ve got postfix configured on each of my VPS servers, plus and internal relay, to relay all mail through SES. To the best of my knowledge it’s worked fine. I haven’t had issues with mail getting dropped or flagged as SPAM.

There is a cost, but with my email volumes (which are admittedly low) it costs me 2-3 cents a month.

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