Ask HN: Self Hosted vs. Gmail / Outlook? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Self Hosted vs. Gmail / Outlook?

#21

Post by sliken » Thu, May 04, 2017, 8:24 AM UTC

akulbe wrote: post #3

http://mailinabox.email Formerly, I'd say maintaining your own email server isn't easy. It was hell trying to set one up 10-15 years ago. This guy (and the contributors) have made it about as easy as it can get. I've hosted mail for one of my domains on a DO droplet, where I set up a mail server with that guide. Been running it for ~4 years. No issues. Highly recommended.

Run an ubuntu LTS makes it pretty easy. There's many guides. Make sure you control DNS that allows you to set MX and SPF records and the like. It's really just tweaking a few config files after you apt-get install dovecot postfix amavisd clamav. If that sounds scary pay a few $ a month for protonmail fastmail, or one of the others with a decent reputation.

Re: Ask HN: Self Hosted vs. Gmail / Outlook?

#22

Post by unicornporn » Thu, May 04, 2017, 8:29 AM UTC

If you're worried about privacy, I hope all your contacts use GPG. Practically none of my contacts know how to use that. Practically all of my contacts use Gmail and Outlook.com. That means all of my emails will end up in Google and Microsofts hands anyway. I'm sure they will build shadow profiles on me (especially since I'm a former customer, using the same domain alias on my new host as I did with them).

That being said, I recently switched to https://mailbox.org (they have a very good reputation). Mainly because I love the web UI it's an awesome service and I get CalDAV and CardDAV that works beautifully.

Re: Ask HN: Self Hosted vs. Gmail / Outlook?

#23

Post by yuvadam » Thu, May 04, 2017, 8:37 AM UTC

Pay for a good email service instead of selling your private data to the advertisement industry. I personally use Fastmail and they are awesome.

Re: Ask HN: Self Hosted vs. Gmail / Outlook?

#24

Post by tomw1808 » Thu, May 04, 2017, 8:44 AM UTC

Interesting, I am not the only one. Additionally for me, its also pretty expensive to host domains for all my startup-ideas on gmail. I know, it's just $5/user/mo, but if you run 20-30 "fun ideas" it adds up...

So I used a scaleway.com instance and installed https://github.com/sovereign/sovereign/

I forked it and made it especially for my own usecase working for the scaleway VPN https://github.com/tomw1808/sovereign

So far I am pretty pleased. I opted against mailinabox because I want to use the server for other things too and mailinabox strongly suggests against it...

Re: Ask HN: Self Hosted vs. Gmail / Outlook?

#25

Post by nebulon » Thu, May 04, 2017, 8:51 AM UTC

Hi, we had similar concerns about privacy and have built https://cloudron.io to solve not only the hassle of setting up email but also other services where applicable selfhostable options are available.

The mail server is fully built into the platform itself and automatically takes care of all the tiny details required to get over the often stated deliverability issues (SPF, dkim, PTR, ...). So far we have found that many of the issues described here are not actually a big issue as long as everything is setup the way those large providers want it to be. The occasional report from a user about getting blacklisted usually is a matter of submitting the required form on the providers unlisting site. They do act timely as well in my experience and the process is not very time consuming.

Overall I was pretty surprised how well it works in the end, given that there are so many reports about selfhosting email is too complex to deal with.

Re: Ask HN: Self Hosted vs. Gmail / Outlook?

#26

Post by felixsanz » Thu, May 04, 2017, 8:55 AM UTC

If you're worried about privacy check https://protonmail.com

Re: Ask HN: Self Hosted vs. Gmail / Outlook?

#27

Post by nunobrito » Thu, May 04, 2017, 8:56 AM UTC

ccozan wrote: post #10

TurboHaskal wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is Germany any better?

Hier privacy is like a king. Everyone must ask permission to access any data, otherwise a legal hell will unleash.

Simply not true. Telekom gives your data on a plate to whichever agency wants to access it. To the point that an NSA watch post is 5 minutes away from the Telekom headquarters in Darmstadt.

Re: Ask HN: Self Hosted vs. Gmail / Outlook?

#28

Post by smnscu » Thu, May 04, 2017, 8:57 AM UTC

I'm the ex-CTO of Lavaboom, a German startup that did encrypted email. Right now I'm working on Oakmail, which will be even more radically open and easy to use. I reckon it will be 2-3 months before we launch an open beta (and of course you will be able to deploy it any time once it's usable).

https://oakmail.io/