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.
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
Rackspace gets blacklisted exactly twice a year, like clockwork. So how’s it any worse?
Exchange
Wouldn’t the cost be prohibitive for selfhosting?
No 🏴☠️, we talk selfhosted, not business.
Alternatively if you use SOGo for groupware/webmail it serves Exchange ActiveSync. No windows server needed!
Not 100% though because CalDAV.
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.
Modoboa + Thunderbird
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?
5 usd a year vpc… and host your own domain and mailserver
Purelymail.com -- based on a similar thread here 6 months ago. They are very affordable, and I have 5 different domains hosted with them. They only bill based on traffic and storage. I liked being able to have multiple domains without any additional charges.
My setup is: Namesilo for domains, Hetzner VPS with autobackup, Mailcow selfhosted. (Few manual updates with backups per year). Just copy paste steps from Obsidian notes. Cloudflare DNS just in case of ddos etc.
I have 3 domains with maybe 6 emails and catch em all. I do not send/receive a lot. Maybe 5-10 emails per day. Most of them are notifications from systems.
All good. I’m happy.
Postfix or opensmtpd and dovecot probably
If you self host you are at the behest of your domain registrar.
Zoho.
self hosted mailserver here (on an old, dedicated vps)… just dovecot/postfix/mysql and the usual (amavis & spamassasin) - if i need to add/edit/delete users or domains, that’s just a bash script.
there’s lots of other options already mentioned, but you could also consider aws for this: you set your domain up with them (or verify it), set SES to forward inbound mails to wherever you want, and set your mailclient to send out through ses.
antispam & dkim/dmarc/spf included.
Maddy self hosted + Blue mail as client for phone. But be ready to be DMARC compliant :) not difficult just annoying.
Eh Exchange
Personally I DO self-host… and I have very few problems. I get blacklisted occasionally but it’s not been a huge concern and is usually only the low-priority blacklists… I did have to go through jumping through hoops early on to get my IP accepted but I haven’t had problems in years.
For my mail server these days I use Docker Mailserver. It’s really complete as a server (no frontend though) for setting up a really good IMAP/SMTP server. I have a full docker swarm cluster running here that keeps it VERY reliable. For a frontend on my desktop I use Evolution or Thunderbird (I’m a Linux user).
For a web frontend I have a few I have played with. My current “primary driver” is Snappymail acting as a plugin to my NextCloud instance. However I’ve had good experiences using E-Groupware which is VERY feature complete as an Outlook alternative.
Hope that helps!