Yes. Using Mailinabox.email on a €3 VPS, since 2016. Have had zero issues with it. I mostly use aerc but recent versions of Roundcube are pretty slick as well.
Do your emails ever end up in people's spam folders, or bounce?
Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?
41–50 of 209 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?
#42I just use FastMail with a custom domain. What's especially nice is that it lets you generate aliases that use the fastmail.com domain. Great for signing up for sites where I don't want them to be able to identify me. This wouldn't work if I was hosting my own email since you'd be able to link all my identities by matching the domain.
> What's especially nice is that it lets you generate aliases that use the fastmail.com domain. Great for signing up for sites where I don't want them to be able to identify me. I love this feature so much. It also integrates into 1Password and you can automatically create a masked email on any signup. I exclusively use it now. It's awesome
Oh yeah, and when you delete a masked email it's archived forever and you can restore it at any time. Useful if you really need access to an old masked email account you deleted ages ago. It's a killer feature for me.
Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?
#43The best of all worlds is to use your own domain, and point it at a paid professional mail service. It is reliable, and you can easily switch services in the future without changing your email address.
and you still lost all of old email if you switch to another mail service right?
That's, what imapsync is for:
Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?
#44Yes, I have my own cobbled-together mail setup on a home server. I would probably use a commercial service if I didn't already have a server running numerous other things, though.
Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?
#45I did a bunch of research on this earlier this year. I really do enjoy Gmail, even if it is technically a cloud service. So, I split the difference on this one. I use a Gmail account as "primary", but I still have my own domain for email inboxes. The best option I found is to have my own domain (e.g. at Hover) and then have the MX servers managed by Cloudflare's new product, email routing. They also handle SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. That's described here[1] and here[2]. What's nice about this setup: you have your own domain; you can setup custom forwarding rules; all email flows to a single GMail inbox. You can also still send email "from" those domains if you use the Gmail SMTP server[3].
So then your only concern is backup and email message export. For this, I setup automation with a script called got-your-back (gyb)[4]; it's a nice Python script with incremental backup that can archive your Gmail account and restore it to another account. I set up a second Gmail account to test this restore functionality.
[1]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-email-routing/
[2]: https://www.cloudflare.com/products/email-routing/
[3]: https://jhart99.com/cloudflare-outbound-email/#outbound-emai...
Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?
#46Mailinabox on a droplet, on a domain I own. Has worked great for 7 years now. I receive *@mydomain.com, and when I sign up for a service X I give them servicex@mydomain.com. Good for spam control and that way I know who is selling my address.
Recently I've been using docker-mailserver with my web apps and that's great too.
Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?
#47The best of all worlds is to use your own domain, and point it at a paid professional mail service. It is reliable, and you can easily switch services in the future without changing your email address.
and you still lost all of old email if you switch to another mail service right?
[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?
#48I've been running my own email server for 20+ years. As of now, it costs well under 10€/month at Hetzner Cloud and it uses Debian jessie and whatever exim and dovecot that came with it.
It also hosts my private git repositories in /var/git and a few other services and websites.
One day, I will migrate it to Arch Linux.
Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?
#49I just use FastMail with a custom domain. What's especially nice is that it lets you generate aliases that use the fastmail.com domain. Great for signing up for sites where I don't want them to be able to identify me. This wouldn't work if I was hosting my own email since you'd be able to link all my identities by matching the domain.
Do your emails ever end up in people's spam folders, or bounce outright? Considering this setup for myself
I had a couple people tell me my mails went to spam, but I reckon it was just an excuse for not answering. Apart from that, I never had any problem at all in the 5 years I've used them with a custom domain.
Their spam system works great but needs some breaking in: to train it, you need to have marked and deleted 200 spam emails. Only when you delete spam, the system updates its filter. I had some annoying spam that kept landing in my inbox, I had to create an automated "send to spam" rule until the personal spam filter started kicking in.
Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?
#50The best of all worlds is to use your own domain, and point it at a paid professional mail service. It is reliable, and you can easily switch services in the future without changing your email address.
and you still lost all of old email if you switch to another mail service right?
Email was designed for people to store their own email on their own device. Webmail changed habits and perception, but it's still possible to store email on your device(s) via IMAP etc. If you use a traditional fat client, you won't "lose" anything switching providers. However, responsibility for backups and disaster recovery falls (back) on your shoulders. This is the trade-off that keeps people on webmail, IMHO, even more than having to deal with blacklists, etc.