All this new excitement with Lemmy and federation has got me thinking that maybe I should learn to run my own instance. What always comes up though is how email is the orginal federated technology.
I am looking at proxmox and see that is has a built in email server, so now I am wondering if it is time to role my own.
I stopped using gmail a long time ago, and right now I use ProtonMail, but I am super frustrated with the dumb limitation of only having a single account for the app. I get why they do it, and I am willing to pay, but it is pricey and I don’t know if that is my best option. I guess it is worth it since ProtonVPN is included. It looks like they are expanding their suite.
Is it worth it? Can I make it secure? Is it stupid to run it off a local computer on my home network?
Yes, with mailcow.email and a catchall and random email system with Anonaddy.
Thank you for the leads! I have a lot of research to do.
I am also using mailcow to host my own email server, and it’s pretty fantastic. One thing that I wanted to note, because as many people have mentioned, the actual sending of emails is a real pain, and hard for anyone that isn’t a major player to not be blacklisted. I am utilizing PostmarkApp as my SMTP provider. They are a leader in transactional sending of emails from applications. For a relatively small subscription fee, you can configure mailcow to use Postmark (or a similar service) to send your emails with higher success rates.
You can do some research on providers that have good track records for sending out transactional emails from applications (geared towards programmers) and test it out. I believe that AWS also has a service that’s usable.
The really nice thing about this setup is that it’s inexpensive and easy to have multiple domains with multiple mailboxes on each, compartmentalized, and not have to worry about your outgoing mail being rejected.
AWS has Simple Email Service (SES) which works, although it’s annoying to have to resort to a corporate service for outgoing mail just to make sure it’s delivered. Reliable delivery to every recipient when sending directly from a small mail server seems practically impossible nowadays.
This is probably the most solid advice I have gotten concerning the sending problem. I really hope I can setup something stable and reliable that works in the long term. I do like that once I have my own domain, it is easy to port to other services or providers.
I think I will take it slow. Learn to use docker. Learn to use proxmox and launch VMs. I have slept on these technologies because I am not a developer, so I it never seemed better than just installing stuff from my package manager. Now I want to learn.
Proxmox is a fantastic option. Let me know if you ever need any help with the setup. Learning new tech options, trying out new things is always something I enjoy doing. Even failing through things is invaluable. Best of luck with your setup.
Proxmox is wild. It does so damn much and is open source. The subscriptions look reasonable too. I don’t plan to make money with my server, but I LOVE the range of options they have. Very granular, makes it affordable for everyone.
Enterprise software is no joke, using it makes me feel powerful, like I can do anything without needing to be a wizard.
Another happy mailcow user here. I used to have everything set up manually until a few months ago when I decided to migrate into a bigger hardware instance.
My only complaint is that I can’t find a self-hosted way to protect the actual mailbox with 2FA. IMAP/SMTP have plain username/password authentication.
That would be next to impossible to fix because the issue lies with the protocols not with the framework using the protocols.
Out of curiosity, what is anonaddy used for? I looked briefly on their site and it appears to setup email aliases. You can do that in mailcow though.
Is there anything else that it allows you to do?
Well it is a different type of mail system. I use it for catch all. I have like 200 domain names for various projects or registered to sell and I want to catch all emails sent to those domains without setting them up in mailcow. With Anonaddy I verify their DNS records and that’s it. I can capture all emails sent to them and forward to a specific address. Also, I can use whatever email address I want with whatever domain I want to subscribe to services and keep track of who sells my email for instance. They also have a Chrome extension that you can use to generate emails, but imho that is overkill. Then if you see that one email gets too much spam you can simply delete that forwarder and it gets rejected in the future.
Very interesting. Thanks for the follow up.
You’re most welcome.
Ditto with Mailcow - easy enough to set up, and has worked well enough for setting up multiple domains etc.