I give up.
I tried left and right to try to install an email server so I could degoogle my life.
But therechnical barrier is thick and Google keeps adding more to it. Forget it. I can’t even get thru the installation process much less trying to get my shit off Google.
I figure, I don’t actually have any need for my email addresses. Just like my phone number. I never call anyone. I’m going to discourage my kids from using email at all. I’ll remind everyone I know that I don’t use email at every opportunity I get just like I remind people to not call me and that my phone number is not available.
Between spammers and Google, I just don’t need this headache in my life. My mom is much less technically savvy than the average pet. So Google will just siphon her data and when the megabits are full then you just delete the old stuff.
You don’t need it. No one will spend their life reading your emails when you’re gone or watching your videos or listening to your recordings or viewing your photos. There’s no need to worry about just deleting the pile of shit you’ve accumulated. I’m this done.
Running your own email server is easy.
Getting your email accepted by other servers is hard.
Hosting anything publicly requires a significant amount of hardening.
Neither of those two tasks are easy or low maintenance. I self host almost everything and I’ve run my own mail server (with occasional rejection). It’s not worth it for me; I now use a commercial, paid provider for email.
I prefer to follow the advice from people who actually set up and maintain email servers: “Fucking don’t. It’s not worth it.”
Just get a custom domain and run it through an existing email provider.
I’ve been running my own eMail server for almost a quarter century, and I have no clue what all the fuss is about.
Sure, providers are getting very picky about what domains that they will receive eMails from. But that’s why I have gMail, Yahoo, and Microsoft webmail accounts - so I can train their systems by exchanging emails once a quarter.
And yes, you do have to be running whitelists and blacklists and tarpits and have a good Fail2Ban in place. And good geoIP system if you want to cut out regions that you are unlikely to ever have legitimate mail originate from. But that’s just common sense security.
I hate that it’s come to this, but you are right.
It’s not that it’s too difficult, it’s that there are too many things beyond your control due to the central duopoly of Google and Microsoft for email. If you end up in their bad graces it’s hard to get out, and they don’t care about you, there’s no support or someone to talk to to get off the ban list.
Would you care to give some additional context here? I haven’t had the itch to host my own e-mail, but what kinds of misfortune do you encounter when you’re not in the good graces of Google of Microsoft? And what could land you in that situation?
Mostly reputation of your IP address and domain, things which are hard to untangle. If you manage to get a clean IP you might be all clear.
There’s other configurations that are required and if not right can harm your reputation, it isn’t something you can set and forget.
What is your reputation in this context? And what does losing it cost you?
Deliverability to major providers like Google or Microsoft. Can be just getting your emails flagged as spam, or them being sikently dropped and never delivered even to spam. Making it impossible know if your emails are being ignored by the recipient or not even delivered to their inbox. It’s also impossible to troubleshoot.
Maybe you said so in some lingo that’s foreign to me, but what upsets that reputation? What kinds of configurations do they not like, and why is it not set and forget? Sorry for asking for a dissertation, but I never had any idea e-mail could be more complicated than set and forget.
There are a few standards now, DKIM, SFP, DMARC, maybe more now, I don’t know. If you send emails without these configured correctly the reputation of the domain and IP are lowered.
Past some internal threshold, you go from inbox to spam, and from spam to silently dropped.
Further, if you send too many emails in a short time, or more emails than usual, your reputation is lowered.
I’m sure there’s more, but these are the kind of things that make it difficult. You make a config error, don’t realize, then people start not getting your emails. You fix the config, but there’s no way to get the reputation back and nobody at Microsoft or Google to ask to re-evaluate you.
Yes exactly. For me, I could figure it out given enough weekends. But screw that. For my wife, my kids, my mom and dad, those things are hyroglyphics.
Personally I don’t self-host email :
- For personal emails, I use posteo.de
- For accounts, I use alias vault
You don’t have to use Gmail. There are many, many other options.
Thanks for introducing me to posteo, was looking for something to leave proton for
I outsourced my email to a provider.
Works great and only costs me 8€ per month for not having to wrestle IP spamlists, mailserver maintenance and reachability.I like email.
I pay for my own domain. I pay a privacy focused European provider for email and they let me use my own domain. I use an European DNS provider.
So I have email addresses with my own domain and the setup is pretty straightforward and I can use webmail or a desktop|mobile client.
just get a trustworthy hoster and a good client application. Boom, most of the benefits with none of the headache.
And yeah, E-Mail is, what a decade of expanding scope does to you.
A decade? Email has been around longer than the web. Roughly forty years.
Ok, two decades.
As much as I would like 1981 to only be two decades ago, I’m afraid it was four and a half decades ago.
A generation?
Self host all the services you want, but don’t ever touch sendmail and bind. The most constantly attacked services I’ve ever had my ass on the line for. I won’t even manage them for money anymore.
Sounds like a deal to me.
People repeat and repeat that email is hard but it’s a legend. I have been self hosting for years on a residential ip and a random domain and it just works
I self hosted for many years but gave up due to family members complaining about the occasional rejection. You are made of stronger stuff than I am, kudos.
You were ambitious providing it for your family
I rage guit my email server long ago. True, as evidenced in this thread, there are some who successfully run their own email server and that’s awesome. I am quite jealous. I too gave up, but I went with a small EU based company. It’s no frills, just the basics. I don’t send/receive a lot of email, so I don’t need all the bells and whistles. If you’re de-googling your life, you don’t have to specifically run your own email service. I do hear a lot of positives about MailCow tho.
I mean I did an email transfer as a multihat guy at a small business and mx records are a bitch. granted more so because there needs to be no loss or delay. might be easier for an individual. but I don’t roll my own.
Have you tried https://mailcow.email/
Its dockerized and preconfigured and cones with tools to manage. I am happy and I never wanted to touch mail.
I did try this. It’s pretty easy up to the point where you need to do SSL or connect to Gmail.
To go to IMAP with GMAIL now you have to register as a Developer, you have to create a project and then create a key for that project once those things are created??? Where do they go? Heavens knows.
All of these, even if you get them to work today, Google can just break them tomorrow and you won’t know until maybe a few days without emails have passed?
Ah Now I understand the issue. Most people are complaining about mail in general but this is just Google being google. Alright, good luck!
Given I don’t need too much privacy for generic E-Mails (I use my Tuta mail address for that) I’m using purelymail with advanced pricing for ~5€/year. (If I cared more about privacy in emails I’d use Tuta for 3€/month)
I just checked out Posteo and Purelymail but one question lingers… How do I get all my emails out of their servers immediately as I get them and into a centrally accessible server that I can use to search thru my email from any device and accumulate more than just 3gb or 4gb or 15gb or whatever the next service’s limitations might be?
The reason I shouldn’t serve my own is because we have blackouts during storms so if I was traveling I wouldn’t be able to access things that would require email confirmation as a 2nd factor. That’s one reason for example.
But yeah I would like to have many devices be able to access the same emails thru a webmail client.
Short answer: IMAP and the
mbsynctool (aka “isync”). It can sync between two IMAP accounts or between IMAP and local storage (either/both ways).If you just want syncing between two IMAP accounts there’s also
imapsync, which is available both as a program and as an online service run by the guy who maintains the program, priced as “pay what you want”, which can migrate your inbox on the fly to another service.What I’ve done myself is to run mbsync periodically (made myself a custom Alpine image with cron and mbsync) to bring emails over. Added an IMAP server container on top of the local copy of the emails (tons of options, Dovecot is popular). Added a webmail app behind reverse proxy, talking to the IMAP server on a private docker network (Roundcube). And a Borg Backup job to take an extra backup (incremental, deduplicated and encrypted) of the email archive.
In theory I could also connect the webmail to the SMTP of whatever email provider I’m currently using and be able to use it to also send. I don’t do that because I have email clients connected to the provider on both desktop and phone so it’s not a requirement, but I could if I wanted to.
This approach lets me periodically trim down the emails stored at the provider to only the most recent. This lets me also use providers that offer small amounts of storage. My recent emails are available instantly through IMAP to the provider. Starting within last 24h and going back forever they’re available at the archive webmail.
I can switch email providers at any time as fast as DNS records propagate (because I use @my.own.domains) and as fast as I can update the IMAP/SMTP credentials for my phone/desktop/mbsync.
I haven’t played with email extraction to my own server yet (their server is perfectly syncing my devices and has basic searching) but regarding limits: Purelymail’s advanced pricing is 4€/year + usage (very fair prices for usage). So you aren’t hitting limits. Theres a calculator on their advanced pricing site that lets you input numbers and tells you how much you’d pay.
Sorry you’re having a bad time. Dockerized Mailu has been working great for me for about a year now. Difficult in the beginning but worth it. Glad I got though it.
Try tutamail or proton if you want to degoogle.
I don’t self-host email but I don’t use my own domain to have control over it. Look into FastMail and a custom domain. That’s the happy path.
Damn I been using Gmail since the invite days. How does one even transfer their Gmail account? Best case to just set a POP service or mail forwarding to a new one?
Painfully migrate all accounts to the new email.
For existing emails: IMAP the old gmail, export them somehow and reimport to the new account.
For new that still arrive on gmail: Auto forwardStalwart Labs have a new tool called “Vandelay” https://github.com/stalwartlabs/vandelay which does import / export via IMAP and JMAP. Pretty slick.
I was in the same boat until recently. Got a Proton account. There’s trivial import setup that both grabs all your email from Gmail, and it sets up forwarding.
Then you gotta start changing your email in different services to the new one. Should probably register domain for your new email so that you don’t have to do this exercise again if you switch out of Proton.
Install Proton’s mail bridge and Thunderbird to backup all your mail. Has better search too.
Easiest way is a program called imapsync
