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!!

IHateFacelessPorn, (edited )

If you ever decide to host your own, via VPS or sth consider checking docker-mailserver and watchtower. First takes care of the mail stuff and the second updates your containers frequently so you will not have to manually update to new versions of the container (for security patches etc.).

Paragone,

EasyDNS.ca or if they also do EasyDNS.com

GoDaddy was a bunch of sleazebags, back in the day…

Go search slashdot.org for them, and see…

not only hosting lots of sleazebags, but also having tons of compromised mail machines, so their machines were, according to what I’d read there, the source of much of the world’s spam, and they wouldn’t fix things.

EasyDNS was recommended by one of the SysAdmin reporters on The Register, a few years ago.

He also recommended Linode & Vultr, back then, too.

This stuff in this comment is just my opinion, and my memory of what trustworthy people were reporting a few years ago.

_ /\ _

Symphonic,

There is a security risk of using your first name and last name in your email. It’s very easy for malicious people to send you emails specifically addressing you. I have realized it now and I take the extra steps to set up good spam blocking in my email.

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

helenslunch,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

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.

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?

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

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.

fine_sandy_bottom,

Friends don’t let friends self host email.

Easy enough to make it work, but maintaining 100% uptime and 100% deliverability is very difficult.

Engywuck,

Domain+Zoho Mail Lite subscription (less than 1€/month, ATM).

kuadhual,

I’m an admin of a self hosted iRedMail (with iRedAdmin Pro).

My advice is: Don’t.

Getting an email server running is easy. Managing them is not.

There are some good advice here. Use commercial service with personal domain.

Deebster,
@Deebster@programming.dev avatar

Self-hosting email is not at all easy, and I’d recommend paying for hosted email from a service that lets you use a custom domain. Most will let you have multiple inboxes, although this may cost extra.

Then, just buy a domain (NameCheap is fine) and point your MX records at the email provider.

NESSI3, (edited )

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bjoern_tantau,
@bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de avatar

As far as I know Gmail and others also offer using your own Domain with them. Maybe that’s easier for you.

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