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.
What is the problem? I have been self hosting my mail for the last 20+ years and has always worked pretty well.
I rent a VPS for that since you should not use a residential address for email servers.
If you are careful enough to configure it properly I assure you that it works and it’s perfectly usable and stable
All my family primary email addresses are managed in that way on my various domains and we never had a single issue
Today it’s even easier because there are all in one docker based solutions. But going the hard way is perfectly doable as well.
Here is my experience, on my wiki, if you are interested https://wiki.gardiol.org/doku.php?id=email%3Astart
Be aware that there are no optional steps: everything must be properly installed and setup from DNS entries to dkim/dmarc and certificates. But I promise, maintenance it basically zero after a proper setup. And I think twice in 20 years something broke. And the nice part of that email will just be delayed and delivered after you fix it, nothing gets ever lost
I love email, with all it downfalls, it’s still one of the most resilient and solid stuff on the internet.
Never self host email. It’s way too much of a pain.
Why people keep spreading this misinformation? It’s plainly not true and I am the living proof of that.
Been using my email self hosted (on VPs) for decades now, never had serious issues at all. And it’s all my family primary addresses
It’s not too bad if you use an outbound SMTP relay for sending. SMTP2Go is pretty good, and they have a free plan with 1000 emails per month. I use Mailcow and you can configure relays in their web UI, but it works just as well with the
sender_dependent_relayhost_mapssetting in Postfix.Sure, it’s not fully self-hosted, but the interesting part to self-host is the storage of your emails, not the sending (which will just relay through other SMTP servers along the way anyways).
Yeah, hosting your own email server is pretty tough.
I think something like https://migadu.com/ might be more in the middle of hosting your own server and purely using someone else’s frontend.
I gave their self-hosted version a go and got stuck with the gmail connection. For Auth2.0 they’ve built some new bullshit. I think I gotta create an app to pretend I’m a dev, then use that app and password to allow it on my security settings… Google is such a bunch of shit assholes. Fuck Google! With a splintered rusty corrugate hose. Assholes. Who is gonna do that? Nobody. It’s just a tiny bit more than whatever technical knowledge I’m willing to spend cells on. Nah, I’m done.
This really saddens me. Email is such a fundamentally good and open protocol. The only reason people don’t like it is because of big tech’s shenanigans.
I run an email service called Port87. I invite you to try it and see if it can convince you that email is actually a great technology, when detached from big tech slop. It’s got some really killer features that make it great for organization and preventing spam. You can also tell it that on certain addresses, it should completely ignore the strict auth requirements it usually has, so it will accept email from your own services without you having to set up all the extra bullshit that’s meant for stuff that matters more.
Fair enough - I got it working recently but it was the hardest self-hosting install I’ve done. No way most people would succeed. Email is 50(?) years of questionable design decisions piled on top of each other so it’s become a whole world of weird stuff. Doing email should be it’s own tech specialty, like ‘devops’ or ‘db admin’ is. There’s enough depth to it.
There are a ton of email providers who are not Google, though. e.g. https://proton.me/mail. You don’t need to run it on your own hardware.
Doing email should be it’s own tech specialty, like ‘devops’ or ‘db admin’ is.
It literally is, and has been for quite a while :D Enterprise level email admins make a pretty penny eheheh.
Proton or Tuta mail. Supports aliasing so you can make unique email addresses per website, and trash them if you get spammed.
Singing up for a paid account you also get VPN, drive storage, password manager, docs, sheets, AI chat (I know), calendar, meetings and authenticator.
Just get a domain and point it at a provider. Now you’re not locked in and can switch at will upon enshittification. Get one of the offline mail archive services like OpenArchiver. Job done.
It’s not really worth the trouble to try to host your own e-mail. There are lots of e-mail hosts that you can use with your own domain. A few of them are free and there are plenty of low cost ones. As long as you use your own domain, you can switch hosts whenever you want and keep your addresses.
If you want to give it another try, I’ve used Mailcow for about a decade now, after running on Exchange for twenty before that. Mailcow is way easier to set up and maintain than Exchange.
Key to it all is making sure you have your DKIM, dmarc and SPF records set up correctly, as well as a PTR with your internet provider if you can manage it, though that seems optional.
Never had a problem with the big providers bouncing my mails, just a couple little outfits that couldn’t figure their filters out correctly.
That’s the first thing I tried. I could receive emails but not send. Maybe I’ll give that thing one more go.
Posteo is a good provider for 1usd per month.
I moved to https://mxroute.com/ and payed $15 for three years of hosting because they had some promotion.
But about the videos and photos I think you’re a bit wrong, I still rewatch my dads home videos from the 90’s
i have a neighbor that keeps her old answering machine because her late-husband’s voice is on it. she has no home videos or anything else… just a few snapshots and that answering machine.
I also use mxroute. I paid for ten years at once. I only needed it because I wanted a catch-all and my previous hosting provider stopped allowing that.
My email solution for decades has been to have a mailbox separate from my email domain. Currently it’s FastMail. I then give out a different
entity@example.comto each entity that needs my email address. I can then shut off (route to null) any address that starts getting spam.I did order Run Your Own Mail Server because one day I’d like to try.
From the Kickstarter:
Running a mail server is an advanced systems administration skill, though. Mind tricks are not enough. You need to be able to operate a Unix-like operating system, understand logging and TLS, make DNS changes and adjust packet filters. RYOMS takes you through the protocol, configuring Postfix and Dovecot, and the DKIM and SPF and DMARC authentication protocols. (They’re not proper authentication protocols, but that’s what the Empire calls them.) It covers anti-spam measures, mail filters, and virtual domains, all at the command line and with pretty web interfaces. While the reference platforms are Debian and FreeBSD, the Postfix and Dovecot servers and assorted infrastructure work on any open source Unix.
This book does not contain absolutely everything you might ever need to understand running a mail server. Every environment has its oddities. But it does contain the core knowledge that every mail administrator must have. A sysadmin with this orientation can sort out their edges easily enough. Coping with edges is what we do.
I’m sorry to great it’s been so frustrating for you. I know we all have our own tolerances for random junk and I’m glad you’re making the right decision for you at this time.
I’ve been running mailinabox for almost two years now and it has been very good for me. Especially once I send some email to my family members’ Gmail address and had them Mark it as “not spam” my deliverability has become very good.
i get it. i ran my own server for 15 years… and i stopped ~ 8 years ago. it was just too annoying between the spam filtering and -todays-new-security-enhancement-
email is the one service im happy to pay someone to do… from a bunker in switzerland. google not required.
…but you cant not use email and function in the technological world of today. email isnt about communication any longer. its about security and authentication.
Yeah, I’m going to keep using it for that. Just not any personal communication. It’s just bullshit in, and bullshit out. Ran out of space? Just delete bullshit. School needs an email? Okay here’s another junk email send your bullshit into it, I don’t care. Like that. There is nothing in the storage that I need if I don’t put anything into it.
I dunno, mailcow dockerized seems to work ok for me. That being said, e-mail is so 20th century.
