Self Hosted Email vs. Gmail
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Self Hosted Email vs. Gmail
1–10 of 31 posts
Re: Self Hosted Email vs. Gmail
#2Note 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.
Re: Self Hosted Email vs. Gmail
#3Note 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.
Like all these projects, making it hard for yourself is part of the plan. Any sensible person would use GMail and call it a day, or another provider, but certainly not something like that.
But using GMail doesn't give you any experience in system administration, is not satisfying, and no one will hire you because you know how to create a GMail account.
Also, if you pay for a server, you have a server, you don't have to limit yourself to email. You can host a few web pages, make a personal VPN, maybe even a small Minecraft server, or whatever fun project you can think of.
Re: Self Hosted Email vs. Gmail
#4If 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 that you can throw Mailcow (or Mail-in-a-box, or mailu, for a smaller mail solution with fewer fancy features) onto it without performance tweaks. Same advantages, but better bang-for-the-buck.
I'm not sure if I'd go with Amazon for DNS hosting, though, I don't trust their DNS servers ever since their DNSSEC implementation took down Slack for a while.
Re: Self Hosted Email vs. Gmail
#5An important part, adding DNS SPF records, is missing. And I would like to see mention of deliverability stats, since lots of times e-mail send from a new IP is marked as spam in some providers, even if DKIM, DMARC and SPF is all right.
Re: Self Hosted Email vs. Gmail
#6Note 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.
Fastmail has another plus (which no other provider has) its mail client lets you send mail from your random unique email addrso on your domain on the fly.
So while catch-all solves the problem of receiving emails on random email addresses on your domain it gets tricky when you have send emails from those addresses. (Apple mail client allows you to do this in a convoluted way - you have to add the email in advance and if you forgot it’ll be sent from another email)
Re: Self Hosted Email vs. Gmail
#7An important part, adding DNS SPF records, is missing. And I would like to see mention of deliverability stats, since lots of times e-mail send from a new IP is marked as spam in some providers, even if DKIM, DMARC and SPF is all right.
Yeah, the deliverability aspect is deterring me from going self-hosting route. Wonder if split setup is possible - e-mail intake into self-hosted setup, deliver through someone like migadu or mailbox or tutanota.
I currently use migadu and it's almost perfect, except for the API access. I don't care about storing e-mails, just give me a programmatic way to create aliases. Wish they just had API access available as an addon. /rant
Re: Self Hosted Email vs. Gmail
#8Go to lowendbox.com search for racknerd.com and find their annual plan for like $20-25. Use mailinabox. You will be ready in less than an hour all included and won't have to me try for a year.
Re: Self Hosted Email vs. Gmail
#9The way I'm planning to solve this is to refactor my HTTP server to also receive SMTP over HTTP and the same for DNS.
That way you can write your own storage/homepage for handling all your internet needs running in one process.
The biggest problem with selfhosting is spam, and for that I'm going for IP + geolocation so that you can filter things by from where your spam is coming from.
If that fails I'm going to have an authorized from address list system and some kind of RAM only this spam might be something... but that will be memory constrained and lost on reboot!
Eventally we are going to need hashes provided with each new (unauthorized) mail, it's sad but that is the way humans work.
Re: Self Hosted Email vs. Gmail
#10Seems a bit overcomplicated. I am using self-configured Postfix, PostfixAdmin, Dovecot (with xaps daemon for apple push), SpamAssassin, Rainloop (webmail). Everything works on a tiny DigitalOcean VM serving tens of domains, hundereds of mailboxes and millions of emails on daily basis for already more than 10 years.
Using any "package" with require unnecessary management, updates, etc. Surely there are fancy bells and whistles, but do we really need it?