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.
https://proton.me/ Are worth a look at. The allow custom domains and I believe have IMAP support. Additionally they encrypt everything they store so are very good from a privacy side (at least as far as you can be private using email).
Proton for sure.
If you have iCloud+ this is included and you can use Apples Mail app
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.
I’m very happy with fastmail for a similar use case to OP. Definitely a strong +1 fron me!
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.
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.
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.
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.
I moved to this from tutanota so I could have IMAP. No complaints.
I like the GPG encryption option they have as it’s basically what I believe tuta does to their mail by default
Migadu, postale.iO, mailbox.org, mxroute
Look into setting up Mail in a Box. Hosted on a server (I use digital ocean) your own domain name, as many users as you want. https://mailinabox.email/
I’m also in the process of leaving Gandi and I’ve written a post about it here.
If you’re ok with leaving your domains and nameservers at Gandi you just need to edit your DNS records and point them to another email service.
Migadu and MXroute work like you described, one account, multiple domains and mailboxes, they charge for what you use (mails and storage) not mailboxes. They will give you the DNS records to add to your nameservers.
You can use imapsync to copy your mail over to the new mailbox.
Check what it will cost to renew your domains, I had a surprise there too.
You can also transfer domains to another registrar, which may offer a free mailbox with it like Gandi used to do.
There are also other options, like using external nameservers. You can do any combo of domain registrar, DNS service and email service you want, ranging from having them all at one provider to using a different provider for each.
mxroute is currently offering a 10GB lifetime account for a hundred bucks US. One time fee.
you can use Skiff (that’s what i am using)
I’ve had a great experience with Migadu.com. if your use case is many domains/aliases with light use, it’s perfect.
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.
Professional Business Email by Namecheap, Inc. €13.69/year (now €10.02/year with coupon).
How hard is it to host your own mail server? From what I can see it look pretty much top tier
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.
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 doesn’t need 100% uptime, delivery will be retried.
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.
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.
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 john1234@gmail.com. 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!
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).
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.
