I know there are alternatives like proton mail, tutamail, mailbox.org, etc… But what would be the issue if I create an email using my personal domain, stored in my hosting… maybe encryption? It seems that no-one even consider this option, but I am not sure why…
What would you suggest?
Owning a domain for yourself and having a provider send/receive email on your behalf is a common choice, and it has its own benefits such as being able to migrate to other providers easily. As long as you renew your domain properly, it should be fine. Though do note that only you would use that domain, so anyone would know it was you who sent that email.
Owning a domain for yourself AND handling email sending/receiving can be challenging because there’s a chance your email gets filtered as spam, and the receiver doesn’t get what you sent. It’s also possible that your server goes down, and the email sent to you doesn’t arrive properly, though the email server usually try to send again a number of times before giving up.
If you are confident about setting a server, I can personally recommend Mailcow. As long as you set up SPF, DKIM, DMARC, it should pass most spam filter including Gmail. If you don’t want to deal with the potential headache, getting a provider to send/receive emails for you is a good choice too.
I managed to get my mails through 95% of servers I’ve tried, and after evaluating the 5% that didn’t accept my mail, I just realized they can suck my man-tits. But maybe those 5% in your case might be recipients you value.
I hosted my own for a while. We could never send to gmail though and they are saddly too important.
That worked like a charm for me, but some strange German mall hoster demanded the blood of an unborn unicorn or something like that for it to work.
I’ve read this with concerning frequency, was SPF/DMARC/DKIM all in order? I also have to question if it was a matter of IP reputation, since shared hosting IP ranges are usually pretty thrashed.
I rent mailbox services (for a custom domain) from a local ISP and don’t have problems with deliverability as such.
Those were in order (it was 15 years ago so i don’t recall if all existed but at least some did). Probably ip range but who knows
Yeah, did the whole dance too, and tried multiple providers, but no dice. Some got through to others and some to others, but none was even good enough getting through to most.
This was just a few years ago.
I don’t think these safety/security signatures or protocols or whatever, work, as they are supposed to. If the IP space you get has bad reputation, nothing matters, you’re sol.
I’ve been using my own domain pointed at Inbox.eu. They’re based in the EU and I haven’t had any problems, I pay for 2 users, the price is something like 12€ per user per year, so it’s cheap enough for me.
Rolling your own email is a pain. That said, I use a VPS and host my own server with domain name and site for $5/month. Setting it up was a pain, but once you get all the records right so you’re not considered spam, it works really well. That said, I haven’t done anything with webmail; I strictly use IMAP and SMTP.
I agree!
Setup felt like a nightmare but once everything is up and running it’s fine.
The other issue is maintenance which is where I gave up. Easier and more painless to just pay another company to do that and not have to worry about server security, spam, the endless SSH requests for ‘admin’, etc etc
Easier and more painless to just pay another company to do that and not have to worry about server security, spam, the endless SSH requests for ‘admin’, etc etc
Definitely. I do it for fun though. I’m kind of a masochist 😂
If you mean self-hosting email, then good luck.
It’s a lottery with the IP and even the IP space you get, whether anyone will actually receive your emails.
I hosted my own for a few years, but god fed up telling everyone to dig through their junk folder for my emails, and not being responded to very often, probably because of just that.
Maybe some providers have it better, but I tried a few and each was just not good. I really think Microsoft, Amazon, Google and other big players have intentionally separated the good, trusted IPs, ones they use for email services specifically, and made the other worse
I’m basic. Been using namecheap+privateemail for years and no complaints. Mostly through the clients Thunderbird on desktop of FairMail on mobile.
stored in my hosting…
This, specifically, is the issue people are warning you about. Yes, your hosting account from Bluehost has the ability to handle email, but it’s not great. It’s really there just so the server can send admin emails and such, not support a full email architecture.
Simplifying - part of the way spam is detected by the servers that receive an email is to check the IP address from where it came from against a list of IP addresses known to deliver spam. If it’s coming from a spam IP, the message is likely spam, so they either put it in the recipient’s spam folder or fail to deliver it entirely.
Now, you may think you don’t need to be worried because you’re an upstanding web citizen and would never send out spam messages. However, your hosting is on a shared server, with anywhere from a handful to dozens and dozens of not hundreds of other hosting accounts, all sharing the same IP address, and they have this email ability as well. If any one of them, intentionally or unintentionally, sends out a bunch of spam messages and gets your IP address flagged, the entire server loses its reputation for some period of time. Most of the time, this is caused by people not keeping their website security up to date and their site getting infected. The malicious code then goes and sends out as many spam emails as it can before the hosting company shuts things down.
Unfortunately, you end up having very little control over the situation.
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You can ask your hosting provider to do something about your malicious/ incompetent neighbor, but they may or may not.
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You can ask to be moved to a new server, but that’s just playing neighbor roulette.
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If you are able to get your hosting provider to do something about your neighbor, the other email servers in the world are still going to distrust receiving emails from your IP address for some period of time. You can make requests to try and have your IP address unflagged, that they may or may not do.
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Even if you do all the leg work of getting your server unflagged, one of your stupid neighbors could immediately get the server flagged again.
So, as others have said - yes, you can use your hosting account as your email server. But considering it’s only a few bucks a month to have a dedicated email service handle it, it’s generally not worth the hassle and headache.
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Mailcow
I have my own domain and pay for Zoho to host my email. It works well aside from the occasional site that refuses to accept my email as valid because it’s not a .com/org domain.
there is a lot to hosting mail. Reading about it, like this book will educate you about all that’s involved.
To give some context, the special edition of that book has a different title that hints at how very challenging it is to get it right when you host your own server.
Typically, it’s much better to own a domain and pair it with FastMail or other reputable email provider.
I bought a domain through cloud flare qand use them for dns, I use Fastmail as my mail service.
Fairly simple setup.
Same, but with tuta for service. It works fine.
grab a personal domain, setup smtp through proton then have your local mail client archive via imap
email is the only service i would never self-host directly.
Yeah,but please don’t use Proton unless you are aware of their drawbacks and marketing lies. (I am not counting the tweet here…)
Or go through my post history,I have explained multiple times here why proton is not an ideal choice.
Infomaniak or mailbox org might be worth a consideration as well
But why support the Nazi sympathizer?
completely debatable if you dig into it, which i have.
Do enlighten us all.
heres a good in-depth writeup of how a single tweet was blown up by people with an agenda, or a general failure to critically think about words:
believe what you want to believe of course.
Where did you dig this up?
one more reason why self hosted email just isn’t competitive with free/cheap cloud email is the client UX. Gmail is very feature rich while your self hosted email will likely run on RoundCube or SquirrelMail which are extremely barebones.