Comment by warent
5 years ago
I've been considering getting a new email address on a personal domain so it can be more portable and I can change providers.
Does anyone recommend any alternate providers with custom domains, or some OSS? Is it possible to host your own email server on a NAS or RPi something?
Do not host your own email unless you really, really want to do that for learning purposes or something similar.
You can use fastmail, or if you don't want to lose Gmail's UI you can use GSuite which lets you use a personal domain name.
Plenty of people use fastmail and seemed to be happy. If you're OK with its price, I think that's a sweet spot.
It's absolutely possible to host your own e-mail server on VPS. You'll receive mail without issues. But sending mail might cause issues, so unless you're OK with some delivery problems and spending some time to investigate, I don't suggest going that route.
Hosting your email on NAS is problematic. You need to have static IP address with PTR record and most home providers won't offer those services for reasonable price.
I am happy with Fastmail!
With the complete lack of accountability, support, or recourse the giants seem to have, it has never been more important to not put all one's eggs in one basket.
I have done exactly this with Fastmail and my own domain, and the experience was wonderful, as in "why didn't I do this years ago".
Fastmail is Australia based, wouldn't that pose a risk with regards to backdoors?
Many/most people don't see the government as a threat. And since you own your own domain you can migrate to another email provider any time you want if you experience they're doing fishy things.
I am assuming that the entire email system is a Times Square billboard in terms of privacy. This move gives me flexibility.
Seconded
I've self-hosted with a hand-rolled postfix+dovecot, and later with Mailcow's dockerised mailserver (FOSS, good management and webmail UI, strongly recommend).
More recently though I moved my personal domain to Microsoft Exchange Online - it's a lot less flexible than Mailcow (per-head licensing, but there's + addressing and catch-alls now) but I don't have any of the deliverability/gmail-spam-folder issues I used to have.
Exchange P1 Online [2] is roughly the same for my single-user as my old DO droplet cost per month
(edit: side-bonus you get an Azure AD tenant for your domain which is handy for SSO/IdP things)
[1]: https://mailcow.email/
[2]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/microsoft-365/exchange/compa...
Yes, I looked around now for a provider supporting custom domains so I don't need to change address just because I change provider and came up with a few popular ones: Fastmail, Protonmail, Runbox. Note that Protonmail is "special" about their IMAP/POP3 support, only supporting select clients and then via a particular helper application.
It's not only this issue with Google being like a wall when things happen, but also that I dislike their semi-AI based interface. While I like their good spam filter, there's a lot of other stuff going on there, and that without any inbox rules that I have set up.
> Does anyone recommend any alternate providers with custom domains, or some OSS?
I'm happy with Namecheap as my registrar and Mailbox.org for mail services, and have been for years (my Gmail account still exists and forwards the rare message it receives to the other one).
Mailbox.org offers ordinary IMAP and SMTP access + DKIM signing for your domain. Hosted in Germany. Prices vary, I pay about €2/month for several GB I think.
Their webmail interface is bad, but then again, I've never seen one that isn't. And I've never used it after logging in for the first time anyway.
> Is it possible to host your own email server on a NAS or RPi something?
It's possible, but I wouldn't recommend it for something as critical as email. It's not that the actual hosting is hard, it's that more and more of the big providers are refusing to handle email messages from certain networks.
I am very happy with this https://gioorgi.com/2020/mail-server-checks/
It is a docker based email server setup very well done.
I use Fastmail with a personal domain name.
I use Zoho with my own domains. Haven't had any issues so far.
Recommend Zoho as well. Their web client is insanely fast and filled with all sorts of power user features. The gmail client doesn't even compare with how slow it is.
I had trouble syncing contacts and calendars on my iPhone. Has this been fixed? I also couldn't set up notifications for calendar items.
Have been using them for 5 (?) years now and I can't complain as well.
I just recently setup Zoho and seem to be working fine so far. Their web mail interface is decent but I don’t use it much.
Hosting your own email is pretty easy to get started, but without continuous work you will have problems getting good deliverability, and balancing blocking almost all spam without filtering out wanted email is tricky too
mailbox.org from me as well. I compared them with fastmail and they don't upsell on the personal domain and let you pay as you use storage.
Both have unpleasant web accessibility experience, but it is not consideration for many.
Take a look at migadu.com
I second this. Migadu has great support and affordable prices. I also like the fact that you can link any number of domains to your account without extra costs.
I switched from gsuite to protonmail, but I kinda wish I had checked out fastmail