Selfhosted
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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I wouldn't actually selfhost email, it's not particularly easy and there are many issues you will probably encounter. I recommend ProtonMail, it's $3.50/month if you only need email and for $8/month you also get calendar, cloud storage, a password manager and a great VPN. Also, they are very focused on privacy and encryption and their apps are open source. Alternatively you can go with IVPN or Mullvad, both are great. Digitalocean has been fine in my experience, have you had any issues with it?
Nope. No issues whatsoever. DigitalOcean is great. Just curious what this community thought. My main concern is, again, one of choosing as ethical a solution as I can find. I cited Amazon because they are a nightmare company for many reasons and would rather not give them money. With that said, I would also like a service that I can rely on.
I am thinking about proton mail, but I want to try to host an email sever with one of my cheap throwaway domains to see if it would be worth self hosting for my main domain. That's the other part of why I am choosing to self host. I am genuinely curious how stuff works under the hood.
Sure, you go ahead and try it out for yourself to see if it works. Just wanted to let you know that selfhosting an Email server is not easy. Regarding ethics, I like Proton because they support privacy, open source software, and they never sold out to VC. Their website is accessible via Tor, they accept Bitcoin payments and they actually care about their users. That's probably the most ethical email provider you can find.
Thank you! I appreciate it.
Well, as someone also self-hosting email I agree with his solutions but he paints a picture of how bad it is that I feel is a bit exaggerated. But then again I host for myself and my family, I suspect it gets a bit different when you have many users and send hundreds of mail per day.
Only one I've had trouble with it Microsoft, they're the strictest and you need to get some support from them to make it work reliably. Google has an automated service.
Chiming in as another email self hoster; yes it comes with headaches but I can't imagine it any other way. I use Mailinabox but am working on migrating over to the ISPMail setup. I don't think that there's any issues with self hosting mail and we need to stop discouraging it. There AIO solutions genuinely work well. If you're concerned about stability then hold updates back until you can confirm that the newer versions are stable. Yes it is difficult and I don't think most people should do it, but self hosters should be encouraged to do so if they feel capable and willing to take on the workload. We need more diversity in email hosting to prevent making it impossible. I also have no issues sending to large providers like gmail and the builtin nextcloud Integra is really nice. Unsure I'll rebuild nextcloud but i might.
Why move to ISPMail over Mailinabox or Modoba or some other alternative?
I want more control than those platforms offer me. I also want to separate out a lot of components like dns and other stuff. I want to more deeply integrate it into my existing infrastructure. And my current mail server was built before a lot of my now backbone infrastructure. It's time to retire the server and replace it with what I need now. They're VPS so i don't feel bad, that's part of the point. I have a harder time retiring actual hardware
Thank you. Sounds exactly like what I'm planning. I am looking at ISPMail now and will be attempting to follow the directions soonly.
Glad to hear! It's a lot I won't lie, but I look forward to it. I finally have everything i need in place.