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What Are Your Favorite Alternatives to Gmail or Outlook?

I'm contemplating taking control of my email by moving away from mainstream providers like Gmail or Outlook. What self-hosted email services have you tried, and which ones do you find most reliable and user-friendly? Are there any challenges or advantages you've encountered in making the switch?

62 comments

  • The problem with selfhosting email, is that unlike other self hosted things, it lives in a distributed system. It has to talk with other mail servers and they have to talk back. The second part is hard due to spam measures...

    For just the software side, you have a few options. Mail cow, iRedmail, and Mailinabox are very popular. Linuxbabe has instruction on how to build it from scratch using postfix. (Good to learn, but a LOT of work) But recently I stumbled on Modoboa. It does not need docker, so you can run it alone. It is not split foss with everything good behind a paywall. And it does not install unneeded apps like DNS for no reason. But keep in mind that I have only evaluated it so far and not yet put it in production.

    Now for the other needs... To receive mail, you will need a static IP. Theoretically, you can get by with a dynamic DNS, but it will not go well. Your IP will change, and it will still be cached and you will lose email.

    To send mail... (This is a lot more) You will need a clean static IP, with a fqdn and ptr record matching. It will need to be clean, and not in a blocked range of IPs. You will also need SPF and DKIM records, and may need dmarc. And you will need to warm up the mail server and maintain it's cleanliness. Or you can contract out your outbound to other companies like MXroute. If you farm out your outbound, it eliminates most of the complaints above. If you have the skill, you may be able to only route Microsoft and Google destined email, and direct deliver the rest yourself. (I am working on this)

  • To "take control of your email" I recommend buying your own domain, but not self-hosting.

    Having your own domain will allow you to migrate from one email provider to the other, as you stop being locked in to them with their domain.

    If you do not want to use Google or Microsoft, I recommend mailbox.org (used this one for a long time, but had to change, because I wanted to send emails from my aliases). Tutanota is also good choice.

    Protonmail is also there as one of the more popular alternatives to Microsoft and Google, but I find them too expensive.

    Why am I not recommending self-hosting email on self-hosting reddit? Unlike other services, which you can host at your home (which simplifies a lot of stuff and allow you to avoid subscription), you pretty much need VPS for selfhosting email. If your needs are simple, both mailbox.org and tutanota will cover your email needs for 3 euro per month. You don't have to think about security, spam, email delivery, building trust with other email providers. It's their responsibility, not yours. Good luck doing it cheaper on VPS.

    ​

    I personally use M365 business basic, it's very reliable but exchange online might not be user friendly. However price to value ratio is just unbeatable.

  • Disagree with 99% of the other posts. If you self-host your email it is archived on your system. So-called “private” email isn’t after 6 months in the US. And it is more stable and higher performance to run my own Roundcube webmail on my own server. And I can control the spam filtering. All reasons to host your own.

    However there is some “maintenance” involved with unscrupulous black list sites and overzealous email filter software. Google likes to declare basically everything not coming from their buddies as spam Microsoft wants you to kiss the ring. On a work account just this week I tried contacting a German company called Beckhoff and after just 3 “dead” email accounts from previous contacts they decided to ban my entire company (about 100 employees, been in business over 75 years). They also don’t answer their phones. Not sure if they’re still in business or just being German jerks. As a result of their poor performance we may switch to a competitor. I do not put up with that crap.

    Also I’m not sure how to phrase this politely but despite promises unless you are using PGP to end-to-end encrypt your email, and even then it’s not 100%, you can’t ever totally make it private. Also it is impossible to totally ensure identity of the sender although we’ve come a long way. Protonmail recently published how they delivered a criminal to the authorities using the small amount of public information they log.

    As a result I do agree that you should let someone else deal with the black listers, bans, etc. But I strongly disagree with keeping it on a remote server more than about 10 minutes. That means one of three options (for receiving:

    1. If you have a static ipv4 IP use the email service on Cloudflare to act as a mail relay and forward email to your server. Thus Cloudflare’s reputation not yours is what matters.
    2. If you don’t have a static address, you can rent a VPS. Low end box (lowendbox.com) has some great coupons all the time. You can get easily under $12/year. In this case tunnel from your actual server to the VPS. We really don’t “need” the VPS.
    3. Pay for a forwarding server. I used Dynu in the past. Never had an issue. It was I think $10/year. Again this assumes you have an accessible server on a static or dynamic ip. And you are basically paying for what Cloudflare does for free.
    4. Pay for webmail. Again Dynu is $20. Then just program your local webmail to call imap and download everything say every 5 minutes. But it limits you to ONE user or each user doing their own thing.

    On server dovecot and sendmail work well. Roundcube looks exactly like an improved gmail.

    For sending I use smtp2go. At my low usage entire family is free.

62 comments