I’m contemplating taking control of my email by moving away from mainstream providers like Gmail or Outlook. What self-hosted email services have you tried, and which ones do you find most reliable and user-friendly? Are there any challenges or advantages you’ve encountered in making the switch?
I wouldnt selfhost my e-mail. You will quickly be blacklisted since your server wont have a good reputation and will have issues sending out emails to peers.
Rackspace gets blacklisted exactly twice a year, like clockwork. So how’s it any worse?
I love these pessimistic, ignorant takes because at the end of the day I get more money running (setting and basically forgetting) email servers for paranoid people.
Send your marketing emails from somewhere else and you’ll never have issues
https://mailbox.org/ and https://tuta.com/ are pretty neat providers.
After hosting my own email in the 1990s-2010s, I’ve been cured of that and rather give some dedicated vendor a few bucks a year to take care of all the headaches for me.
Proton mail
I found a lot of good info in r/degoogle and r/privacy
Ended up with MailFence
Fastmail, all the way
I bought into Fastmail about 10 years ago (for 7 years) & recently moved to Proton about 5 years ago. Both are excellent privacy-first providers. Gmail is my junk e-mail at this point. Good recommendation. Australia-based business. Fastmail & Proton are my votes. I tried self-hosting for a few years & would agree with below – too many issues with blacklists. This is one you should consider paying for.
I’m getting tired of not having IMAP/SMTP access with Protonmail. How would you recommend Fastmail? Anything negative?
Exchange
Alternatively if you use SOGo for groupware/webmail it serves Exchange ActiveSync. No windows server needed!
Not 100% though because CalDAV.
Wouldn’t the cost be prohibitive for selfhosting?
No 🏴☠️, we talk selfhosted, not business.
This is a joke, isn’t it?
Why?
Mail in a box or poste.io
3rd for MIAB. I use Linode. I believe most ISP’s restrict access to mail ports so running at home is probably not possible.
This is a generalization that not useful to keep repeating. Better advice would be check to be sure YOUR ISP allows access to the ports you need.
Second vote for MAIB.
If you’re not hosting yourself (don’t), Zoho is my suggestion.
Modoboa + Thunderbird
Self hosting with mailcow.
Alternatively proton.me
If you self host you are at the behest of your domain registrar.
I use postfix, dovecot and snappymail. Very happy.
I already had a well-configured postfix (DKIM, DMARC) for web applications, so adding dovecot was easy. It’s also really powerful, you can define who gets mailboxes in scripts. I tried going with providers but I couldn’t get this kind of power.
Mailcow is pretty straightforward to setup and has good documentation. No matter what you choose though be prepared to put a decent amount of work into it. I also recommend using an SMTP relay like SendGrid or Mailgun. That way you don’t have to worry about deliverability as much. If you’re not planning on sending a lot of email (<100 emails a day for SendGrid) you can use their free tiers.
Unfortunately it’s slowly becoming deprecated (I think)
Selfhosting is always best. I just cannot trust remote providers with my mails. Only caviat is you usually need a small server with static IP, most providers block emails delivered from ISPs.
On-Prem Exchange Server. Way better than anything else.
Skiff