Hi everybody,

I’ve had a domain name at Gandi.net for quite a while, which included 5 email addresses as well, hosted on my domain. Now they’re however discontinuing this offer, it will now be €3,99 per month per mailbox.

So, I’ve been looking around a bit. I need a service that allows me to connect it to my own domain name, that actually allows IMAP instead of requiring a special client, and preferably should allow me to put up several mailboxes under the same account since I currently have mailboxes for some of my family members.

Security is not a concern since this is only intended to be used for the email I send and receive under my actual legal name, and I know better than to use email for confidential material.

Zoho Mail seems like a good deal, since they have 10GB per user for only €1,13 a month. I’m just afraid that my emails might end up in spam filters since they’re based in India.

  • @[email protected]
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    2 years ago

    iCloud Plus if you don’t care kids in Africa and would like simplicity.

    Update: don’t beat me guys I’m using Proton 😢

  • @[email protected]
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    22 years ago

    How hard is it to host your own mail server? From what I can see it look pretty much top tier

    • @[email protected]
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      2 years ago

      I’ve been running my own mail server for about 15 years now… Let me offer some insights.

      • Its used by me and the family, so I do have other users who expect things to work.
      • I used commodity hardware, with a Linux host (and guest).
      • the mail server runs in a VM, so it is trivial to: stop, copying the VM to USB, restart.
      • Maintaining uptime isn’t too bad, but when the mail server goes down, you need to get onto it quickly. I’ve had power supplies fail, HDD’s fail, memory fail.
      • If you should happen to be out of town when a failure occurs (I’ve had this twice), then the server stays dead until you are back. That does not make your users happy. If its more than 4 days, then the SMTP standard says email is lost.
      • There have also been a few software issues with Zimbra (my current tool) - the stats daemon filled the disk, the upgrader broke permissions all over the place multiple times. Each of these requires time to investigate, research online etc. Snapshotting is awesome! Right now I have a problem where the VM disk file is growing, but the space used inside the VM is not. I have zero’d out free space and compacted the VM but don’t know why it is happening yet. More research needed.
      • You will learn to hate blocklists. There are many, and there are meta blocklists. You have to watch them because at any time, you will be added and your email will silently get dropped. Sometimes the blocklist trashes whole subnets because of a single actor, sometimes even more, and so you will get included due to other bad actors. Getting off a blocklist is hard… you send emails, you fill in web forms, you look for a contact details, you wait… Then some number of days/weeks later, you are off again.
      • You have to learn DKIM, SPF, DMARK, managing DNS etc.
      • I used to use self-signed certs and live with the warnings. Now I used Lets Encrypt, which is awesome!.
      • You can try to get reverse DNS working, but that’s up to your ISP (who usually don’t care, so good luck). No rDNS can be viewed as bad by email recipients so your spam score starts at >0.
      • If you run it at home, you will be part of a block of IPs that are known to be home users, so your spam score starts at >0.
      • I’m lucky in that I run it on a spare public IP address on my server housed at work. But that will need to change soon.

      I started using native Linux mailboxes, later added roundcube (web UI), investigated Mailinabox, but now use zimbra. That gives me calendar/contact sharing, email/calendar/contacts to iOS devices (which is the main way my family get email), and lots more. Moving data from one to the other took a couple of days of effort. (Yeah… I know its supposed to be trivial, but its not when you include tool research, testing, execution one at a time etc).

      Bottom line - you will learn lots, you will lose many weekends and sometimes a weekday here or there as you try to handle emergencies, it will never be set-and-forget.

      My original rational was learning, privacy and my own domain and nicer looking email addresses than [email protected]. I’m looking for an online alternative as its time to lighten the load, but I have a lot of services that we use in Zimbra.

      Good luck with it!

      • @[email protected]
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        22 years ago

        I forgot to mention - spam isn’t too bad with a well trained SpamAssassin.

        Plus you will need to learn your virtualisation tool really well because of all the networking routes required and operating it on the command line. VBoxManage is your friend, but its just not friendly.

        From a security perspective - I did everything in Linux, and only opened the required ports (plus ssh, which I moved to a random high port number). I have auto-update on for security patches, but NOT for regular patches (because Zimbra tends break things, so you need to snapshot first).

    • @[email protected]OP
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      92 years ago

      You apparently easily get your emails stuck in spam filters if you self-host. Also, you’d need to have 100% uptime for this to work as intended, not particularly easy in my situation.

        • @[email protected]
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          32 years ago

          While technically that is true, if you have any other users they will be annoyed. And anyone running iOS will almost immediately get regular popups about the mail server being down (because iOS checks for new mail frequently - and yes I know this can be adjusted) and so they will be telling you straight away.

          Also - I’m not convinced that all email servers obey the SMTP standard.

          • @[email protected]
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            12 years ago

            because iOS checks for new mail frequently

            Client behavior has nothing to do with email delivery though. That being said, I run my own mailserver and have MacOS/iOS clients and have never seen a connection error.

            I’m not convinced that all email servers obey the SMTP standard.

            Of course, any idiot can write a broken smtp server that nobody uses.

    • Jamie
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      82 years ago

      I’ve done it, and I do not recommend it if you actually plan for people to receive your emails.

      • VanillaGorilla
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        32 years ago

        I managed to adapt for about 95% of mail servers to accept my mails, but it was a lot of work. I’m pretty sure some of those measurements are intended to discourage people from self hosting.

        • Jamie
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          12 years ago

          It took me around 4 hours to get to that point, and sometimes my mail would still go into junk, especially on gmail inboxes.

          • VanillaGorilla
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            22 years ago

            You were way faster than me 😂

            Gmail worked for me, but some bigger German providers just refused to accept my mail. I used a website that tested the server config and gave hints how to proceed. That was incredible helpful.

    • @[email protected]
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      102 years ago

      If you want to make sure people get your emails, and you don’t want to deal with constant spam issues yourself, I’d recommend not running your own.

    • @[email protected]
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      2 years ago

      The hard part is getting a a host that allows the ports, a “clean / private” static public IP and a matching reverse lookup record for it.

      Email servers and spf / dmarc / dkim are not that hard to setup. There is still going to be a “trust” period for some spam filters but if you did everything else right it isn’t too hard other than in bound spam filtering.

  • higgs
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    232 years ago

    If you have iCloud+ this is included and you can use Apples Mail app

  • Oha
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    22 years ago

    Been using Tutanota for a year now. Never had a problem

  • lckdscl [they/them]
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    32 years ago

    I use Migadu, they put restrictions on the number of incoming and outgoing emails, not the number of domains or addresses, it’s not as cheap as the ones you’ve mentioned but per year it comes pretty close.

  • gabe [he/him]
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    122 years ago

    I’ve used zoho before years ago, it’s pretty good. I currently do use proton personally as it has a good mix of stuff, including a VPN.

    • Notamoosen
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      32 years ago

      Just adding that the base level is free up to 5 users is you want to sample it a bit before paying for more features.

    • @[email protected]
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      2 years ago

      Zoho is great, especially for OP’s use case where they want to manage multiple mailboxes under the same domain. The Zoho cpanel can do all that.

      Also Ive never had my outgoing emails rejected.

    • Engywook
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      62 years ago

      Can vouch for Zoho. Cheap and realiable if one doesn’t need encrypted stuff.

    • FawkesGil
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      22 years ago

      Currently using Zoho for my small business and its been great. Bought a domain off of Namecheap for a price of a sandwich and used it on Zoho for free.

  • @[email protected]
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    12 years ago

    Most of the services I know of are about $3-4 per user per month. Google, Amazon, and Rackspace are all either $3 or $4 per user.

  • @[email protected]
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    192 years ago

    Fastmail is awesome. If you want to set it up as receive only, you can set up CloudFlare email forwarding for free and have it forward to your regular account.

    • @[email protected]
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      52 years ago

      I’m very happy with fastmail for a similar use case to OP. Definitely a strong +1 fron me!

    • @[email protected]
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      42 years ago

      I’ve got Fastmail set up for myself (more tech savvy) and for my wife (it needs to ”just work” and easy like Google), and I’d say it’s a solid balance between wanting to do a bit more with the email and a rock solid just works email. At $5/mo (or $50/yr) per user, it’s not cheap, but I think the service is quite good and I’ve been extremely happy with the service provided. I also never have issues with SMTP access for my home server, I don’t think my mail has ever been sent to spam for any of my family or even sending reminders to my work email.

      Their iOS app has also replaced the default / native iOS mail app because it’s just that good, which is a nice plus.

      • @[email protected]
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        22 years ago

        The ability to see up sieve filtering is great too. I’ve got a massive script that automatically sorts and files away most of my emails.

        I want to like Proton Mail, but their sieve filtering kind of sucks, and with large mailboxes it slows down to an almost unusable amount.

    • @[email protected]
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      22 years ago

      I’ve also been extremely happy with fastmail. LOVE the subdomain addressing, ability to use folders or labels for organization, and the integration with bitwarden.

    • @[email protected]
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      12 years ago

      Be aware that the Australian government’s Assistance and Access bill allows them to compel local companies like Fastmail, or even employees of local companies without the awareness of their employers, to implement backdoors in their software without informing anyone about it.

    • Jamie
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      42 years ago

      Second mxroute, I got their black friday deal last year and I’ve liked it.

      • @[email protected]
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        2 years ago

        BF deal is live right meow -10GB, unlimited users/domains, 300 email sends an hour, for $10/year.

        I don’t need it, but I’m thinking about buying it anyway.