Side question. Does anybody know of a decent service that basically works as a smarthost for outgoing and will MX incoming emails back to a mail server I host? I've been self hosting email since the '90s and just don't want all of my email stored elsewhere. The IP reputation chasing is just too much to deal with now.
I played around with smtp2go and it felt like what you’re after.
I know how you feel though. I self-hosted mail for about 5 years with a VPS running OpenBSD. Eventually I looked at “outsourcing” SMTP to get around this crazy IP reputation stuff. But eventually I went with a fully hosted service Migadu.
You may like PurelyMail. I believe you can MX to an external server. I know they offer a free trial that may be worth giving a shot.
uberspace might be what you are looking for. you get a fully maintained mail setup, 10GB of storage, a dozen preconfigured services, a nice wiki and a very cool team of nerds. starts at 5€/month and you can buy your own domain elsewhere (i use inwx).
Microsoft365. It’s like $6/user/month and you get access to the whole MS suite (Word, Excel, etc.). Email is managed by Exchange Online. Crème de la crop as far as email goes.
If you’re in the Apple ecosystem and just want something barebones then you can use a custom domain with your iCloud account. I think it’s called iCloud+.
Funny 😄 pretty much asked myself the same thing, the day before yesterday.
Specifically, I have been looking for encrypted mail hosters supporting your own domain. Also, hosting in Europe on dedicated Hardware (or at least guaranteed European VPS), GDPR compliance and some sort of certification/ verification of the said requirements and their claims!
What I came up with:
I won’t cite their individual plans - that’s for you to figure out in detail.
The thing that bugs me with the Proton Mail and Tutanota, to effectively make use of their threat model/ encryption you have to use their Apps/ Software. EDIT: I’m currently using Microsoft365 - with it you are pretty much locked in - I fear with Proton or Tutanota it’s the same. Migrating is a pain.
I’m trying mailbox.org at the moment - they got a 30-free trail.
I've been using Tutanota. They are kind of similar in principles to Protonmail, but until recently were dirt cheap at €12/yr (now €36/yr). The only "drawback" is that you can only access your mail through their app, this is a feature, not a bug, according to Tutao.
As a single user or small household setup - I'm using Cloudflare email routing, with catchall, forwarded into my Gmail account for receive. For SMTP, I'm using a combination of mailjet.com and brevo.com, which both have fairly robust free tiers for personal/small business use and allow sending from anything@domain.com.
I use Porkbun with Gmail and ForwardEmail.net. They do a great job.
What about Microsoft 365? The tenant itself is free and per account and month you pay about 5-10$ (depending on sibscription level).
With this you have the full MS Exchange experience, you get 1TB of OneDrive space and all the shebang.
I couldn't get it set up to allow each of my family members to have their own email address on the domain. It was basically the opposite of the "no catch all" feature other hosts seem to have - Outlook custom domain was 100% catch all to 1 account. I very quickly undid my partial setup and am back in Google for now.
If you care at all about privacy I wouldn't reccomned M365. Because: Schrems II and MS use your information for their own purpose, and in effect is not compliant with fx GDPR.
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.
Resources:
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!