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Self Hosted Email vs. Gmail

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Re: Self Hosted Email vs. Gmail

#21

Post by sreevisakh »

Yaggo wrote: post #15

I have been self-hosting my email for few years on Digital Ocean VPS. The biggest downside is that your messages are very often classified as spam by big players such as GMail or Microsoft, despite implementing DKIM, DMARC and SPF etc properly on my side. If it's important for me to get my message through, I have to use my "backup" GMail account, which pretty much defeants the point of self-hosting your email.

That is clearly a problem with the big players rather than with self hosting. It should be pretty clear by now that rejection of legitimate mails is intentional. While your argument is justified (I face the same issue), the reality is that we are giving up our freedom under pressure by rent-seekers. I wish the users would resist it more vocally.

Re: Self Hosted Email vs. Gmail

#22

Post by mattzito »

> In this case of GMail, all your inbound and outbound emails are “read” and that information is used to augment your digital footprint and (advertising) profile.

As I will continue saying until I am blue in the face, _this is not true_ . Ads that are displayed in consumer gmail are powered by your web activity same as any other ad, but not your email. If you are a paid user, even more stringent rules apply and you don’t see ads in gmail.

If OP wants to run their own mail server because they don’t want to support Google, totally fine, and it’s great to have articles about doing that. But that’s a lot of work, and people who don’t want to do that shouldn’t have to worry that their emails will be read.

(Disclosure: I work at Google, used to work on Workspace, which Gmail is a part of)

Re: Self Hosted Email vs. Gmail

#23

Post by [deleted] »

mattzito wrote: post #22

> In this case of GMail, all your inbound and outbound emails are “read” and that information is used to augment your digital footprint and (advertising) profile. As I will continue saying until I am blue in the face, _this is not true_ . Ads that are displayed in consumer gmail are powered by your web activity same as any other ad, but not your email. If you are a paid user, even more stringent rules apply and you d…

[deleted]

Re: Self Hosted Email vs. Gmail

#24

Post by danlugo92 »

jeroenhd wrote: post #4

If you're looking to replicate this, I'd recommend Contabo's plans over LiteServer. The network uplink is slower, but you don't need gigabit internet for just email. €6 (inc. VAT) there nets you 4 cores, 8GiB of RAM and 50GB of NVMe storage (or 200GB of SSD storage). Hosted in Germany, and can be paid for monthly if you want to try it out. It's the best VPS provider I've seen, and their cheap servers are big enough t…

> €6 (inc. VAT) there nets you 4 cores, 8GiB of RAM and 50GB of NVMe storage

Sounds great.

I pay $3.5 for 1gb + ssd + maybe 1 or 2 cores? But it's in the US and I do need it to be in the US.

It does have gigabit though.

Re: Self Hosted Email vs. Gmail

#25

Post by doubled112 »

bored_itworker wrote: post #13
theamk wrote: post #2

Note they are paying 6 euro/month per VPS with 40 GB disk, which probably leaves 20-30 GB for messages themselves. A commercial email provider like Fastmail charges $5/month (less if paying annually) for mailbox with 30 GB limit, with free unlimited email aliases and free custom domains. If you are happy with a single mail storage location, this is much easier and cheaper too.

Or 365 Personal with 1TB Onedrive, 50GB mailbox. If you want to add a custom domain you need to buy one at GoDaddy (yuck!)

I know at least one person who doesn't use GoDaddy with their 365 family account but still has the custom domain working.

The values to configure in DNS are available as parameters in the link on the M365 side.

YMMV, of course, but DNS is DNS.

Will they support it? Unlikely. Will it work forever? No way to be sure, but isn't everything temporary anyway?

Re: Self Hosted Email vs. Gmail

#26

Post by kevincox »

Yaggo wrote: post #15

I have been self-hosting my email for few years on Digital Ocean VPS. The biggest downside is that your messages are very often classified as spam by big players such as GMail or Microsoft, despite implementing DKIM, DMARC and SPF etc properly on my side. If it's important for me to get my message through, I have to use my "backup" GMail account, which pretty much defeants the point of self-hosting your email.

I've found that Microsoft is the worst of the big players. They heavily rely on reputation of your IP block. I've found the GMail was pretty quick to accept my domain reputation and I no longer have delivery problems. (Although I don't know what rate you need to send email for them to remember your domain reputation).

For personal email a good option here is to use a relay for sending mail (or for sending important mail). Of course the downside is that the relay can see your mail in plaintext.

Re: Self Hosted Email vs. Gmail

#27

Post by jeroenhd »

danlugo92 wrote: post #24
jeroenhd wrote: post #4

If you're looking to replicate this, I'd recommend Contabo's plans over LiteServer. The network uplink is slower, but you don't need gigabit internet for just email. €6 (inc. VAT) there nets you 4 cores, 8GiB of RAM and 50GB of NVMe storage (or 200GB of SSD storage). Hosted in Germany, and can be paid for monthly if you want to try it out. It's the best VPS provider I've seen, and their cheap servers are big enough t…

> €6 (inc. VAT) there nets you 4 cores, 8GiB of RAM and 50GB of NVMe storage Sounds great. I pay $3.5 for 1gb + ssd + maybe 1 or 2 cores? But it's in the US and I do need it to be in the US. It does have gigabit though.

Contabo used to charge extra for their USA stuff, but it looks like they're having a discount right now where they get rid of the fee. You only pay extra for their Singapore hosts.

I think they've got their formula down well. There are a lot of applications that need more than the 200mbps connection these cheap servers have, but there are also many services that would run fine with even less than that. You don't need a lot of network capacity if you're just hosting stuff for your own personal use, after all.

Re: Self Hosted Email vs. Gmail

#28

Post by zaphod4prez »

mattzito wrote: post #22

> In this case of GMail, all your inbound and outbound emails are “read” and that information is used to augment your digital footprint and (advertising) profile. As I will continue saying until I am blue in the face, _this is not true_ . Ads that are displayed in consumer gmail are powered by your web activity same as any other ad, but not your email. If you are a paid user, even more stringent rules apply and you d…

It would be more honest to say that "this is no longer true." For the majority of Gmail's existence, Gmail did use your actual email content for advertising.

And Google still processes the content of your emails, no? Are all of those smart features like identifying flight bookings done completely client-side (hint: they're not)?

> Although Google stopped scanning email content to tailor ads in 2017, last year the company started showing shopping ads in Gmail. And it still scans emails to facilitate so-called smart features such as the ability to add holiday bookings or deliveries straight to your calendar, or to autocomplete suggestions.

> Every way you interact with your Gmail account can be monitored, such as the dates and times you email at, who you are talking to, and topics you choose to email about, says Rowenna Fielding, founder of privacy consultancy Miss IG Geek.

[Source](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/may/09/how-priva...)

Re: Self Hosted Email vs. Gmail

#30

Post by mattzito »

zaphod4prez wrote: post #28
mattzito wrote: post #22

> In this case of GMail, all your inbound and outbound emails are “read” and that information is used to augment your digital footprint and (advertising) profile. As I will continue saying until I am blue in the face, _this is not true_ . Ads that are displayed in consumer gmail are powered by your web activity same as any other ad, but not your email. If you are a paid user, even more stringent rules apply and you d…

It would be more honest to say that "this is no longer true." For the majority of Gmail's existence, Gmail did use your actual email content for advertising. And Google still processes the content of your emails, no? Are all of those smart features like identifying flight bookings done completely client-side (hint: they're not)? > Although Google stopped scanning email content to tailor ads in 2017, last year the com…

Sorry, sure, yes - for ~5 years, this has been true. 2017 was before my time, and I have no idea what was happening then.

> And Google still processes the content of your emails, no? Are all of those smart features like identifying flight bookings done completely client-side

Of course, no, but the same is true of things like spam detection. What is the difference between scanning emails to see if they are spam and scanning emails to see if they are flight details? Or to scan emails to see if they have malware? In all these cases they’re not used for anything outside of Workspace, and they all provide some value to users.

> Every way you interact with your Gmail account can be monitored, such as the dates and times you email at, who you are talking to, and topics you choose to email about

Sure, yes, this could be monitored. This is the equivalent of saying, “when you use a saas product, the provider can see what you do”. It’s both obvious and uncontroversial- even the e2e encrypted messaging apps can see who you are communicating with and when.

The important consideration is that Google doesn’t use this for anything that is personally identifiable. You can choose to believe this or not, that’s up to you, but the same is true of literally every saas service everywhere.

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