Curious – for those self-hosting, what email _clients_ do you actually use on desktop/mobile?
Personally apple mail.
Thunderbird is also ok.
Roundcube for webmail.
Self-hosting email in 2025 is easy actually (apart from M365)
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Re: Self-hosting email in 2025 is easy actually (apart from M365)
#32Curious – for those self-hosting, what email _clients_ do you actually use on desktop/mobile?
I use apple mail and iOS mail. At one point my wife was using whatever Microsoft's email/calendar/contacts app is called but she's long-switched to apple products.
On the server I have sogo running so I also use iCal and the Mac and iOS contacts apps.
Re: Self-hosting email in 2025 is easy actually (apart from M365)
#33There are actual reasons to self host that aren’t discussed here.
1) BEC filters. I run mail servers for several mid size companies that I am part owner of. We are constantly inundated by BEC scammers. But I now have filter lists that block it. You can’t email my staff using any manager or boss’s name and a e-mail that doesn’t match. It basically shuts down the whole BEC scam. I have one business still on Google apps, and we have now had two employees in that business get fooled by the scammers.
2) speed. Amazon AWS SES is great until you want to send 150,000 emails a day. At this point you’re running into issues with network transfer speeds for each request taking too much time, causing the full outbound send to take too long to complete.
Re: Self-hosting email in 2025 is easy actually (apart from M365)
#34Curious – for those self-hosting, what email _clients_ do you actually use on desktop/mobile?
Thunderbird and Apple Mail, mostly. Outlook if I have to. Same as for non-self-hosted e-mail?
Re: Self-hosting email in 2025 is easy actually (apart from M365)
#35"Microsoft 365 however apparently will hate your email no matter what. you learn to live with it"
The entire thread is bullshit then, because you simply cannot learn to live without M365. M365 is one of the largest group of recipients, and especially in the business world (and business is where the money is). So I inbox my friends on GMail, but when I send my CV or an invoice to a business, my email is not received. How does that qualify as "self-hosting is easy and doable". The delusion is strong in this one.
Re: Self-hosting email in 2025 is easy actually (apart from M365)
#36Curious – for those self-hosting, what email _clients_ do you actually use on desktop/mobile?
I use apple mail and iOS mail. At one point my wife was using whatever Microsoft's email/calendar/contacts app is called but she's long-switched to apple products. On the server I have sogo running so I also use iCal and the Mac and iOS contacts apps.
Are you happy with Apple/iOS Mail? Drives me absolutely insane.
Re: Self-hosting email in 2025 is easy actually (apart from M365)
#37Re: Self-hosting email in 2025 is easy actually (apart from M365)
#38I've been running my own mail server with several domains for me, my now wife, and friends since 1999. It's definitely changed with time and gotten more strict with things like spf, dkim, dmarc, and reverse dns all becoming necessary over the years. But it's not that difficult to be honest. Currently my internet provider is init7 and they offer fixed ip4 and set the reverse dns for me which lets me run the server dow…
I’m surprised this works, usually residential IP blocks are in DNSBL.
I have no problems with my current home ip address (here in Switzerland with the provider init7) but years ago (~20) when I moved my server to a Colo the ip address was marked as a spammer because of the previous owner of the address. It didn't take long to make the ip address clean though - some online processes and also sending some emails. This was so long ago I barely remember what I had to do and I'm sure the process is different now because back then you could contact an actual human...
Re: Self-hosting email in 2025 is easy actually (apart from M365)
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thunderbird and Apple Mail, mostly. Outlook if I have to. Same as for non-self-hosted e-mail?
Well, Gmail/Fastmail/etc have their own clients/products.
Ah, I see. Personally, I wouldn’t really consider using a vendor-specific app when the same vendor-agnostic workhorses have been doing their job fine for decades. Never used Fastmail but back when I still used Gmail, you could use it just fine with IMAP and your client of choice.
Re: Self-hosting email in 2025 is easy actually (apart from M365)
#40My biggest issue with hosted email for awhile was the disconnect that has developed between how most services now seem to bill and how over the now many decades (yeesh!) I've ended up using email. I have my own domains, on a technical level mailboxes ("accounts") are effectively free. So I've used them freely for separating usage (servers and services can all have their own accounts for emailing me notifications, I can use "accounting@mydomain.tld" for financial institutions, etc. For my own servers/services in particular it's good that they have their own isolated email accounts with their own passwords or keys and no ability to spam the world, only email me. It also makes it really easy to use white lists and ensure hard barriers and rules for important stuff so that even if an email address leaks it's irrelevant, and irrelevant in a deterministic manner. I still of course have general addresses that must accept traffic from the world and thus have to worry about spam, but a lot of the most key stuff where I never want to miss a message is from a pretty small circle.
All the typical recommended services though tend to treat mailboxes as the same thing as a person, charging an entire new fee for every single one, and then have hacks like aliases or catch-alls on top. Obviously that works for most and if you're setting up a new workflow can go with that and use other mechanisms for notifications, but for me changing at this point would be brutal. Self-hosted + relay (Amazon SES) works ok though.
That said, I've discovered two nice services (Migadu and MXroute, probably there are more out there somewhere) that charge along my own usage model. Migadu I think has been featured on HN before, and it seems solid. You can make arbitrary accounts under your domain as you wish, the charge is for storage and outgoing mail. So I'm now hybrid, and I could see that making me lazy enough to switch entirely. But I still think knowing how to do it yourself isn't a bad thing, there's some empowerment in having the fallback and remembering how it all works underneath. If nothing else as part of self-hosting you can run your own notifications through it.