I give up.
I tried left and right to try to install an email server so I could degoogle my life.
But therechnical barrier is thick and Google keeps adding more to it. Forget it. I can’t even get thru the installation process much less trying to get my shit off Google.
I figure, I don’t actually have any need for my email addresses. Just like my phone number. I never call anyone. I’m going to discourage my kids from using email at all. I’ll remind everyone I know that I don’t use email at every opportunity I get just like I remind people to not call me and that my phone number is not available.
Between spammers and Google, I just don’t need this headache in my life. My mom is much less technically savvy than the average pet. So Google will just siphon her data and when the megabits are full then you just delete the old stuff.
You don’t need it. No one will spend their life reading your emails when you’re gone or watching your videos or listening to your recordings or viewing your photos. There’s no need to worry about just deleting the pile of shit you’ve accumulated. I’m this done.
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Yes selfhosting it is awesome but it’s definitely not the simplest service to do host.
I think what OP means is that you can mix using an external email provider with storing your own email archive + an IMAP server + a webmail app. You can let the provider deal with the IP reputation and all that pain and just use their SMTP and IMAP to send email and pull to your local server, respectively. If you use your own domain you can also switch the provider in 10 minutes by simply changing your DNS records and retain the same address.
The hard part for me when giving up Gmail wasn’t the stuff above, it was tracking down all the places I was subscribed as @gmail.com and replacing it with @my.domain addresses. That took about 6 months. The local pull + IMAP + webmail took a weekend to set up.
Never self host email. It’s way too much of a pain.
If it was painful for you, this does not mean nobody should even try. FMPOV my mailbox contains too much personal information to host in in the cloud.
Fair enough - I got it working recently but it was the hardest self-hosting install I’ve done. No way most people would succeed. Email is 50(?) years of questionable design decisions piled on top of each other so it’s become a whole world of weird stuff. Doing email should be it’s own tech specialty, like ‘devops’ or ‘db admin’ is. There’s enough depth to it.
There are a ton of email providers who are not Google, though. e.g. https://proton.me/mail. You don’t need to run it on your own hardware.
Doing email should be it’s own tech specialty, like ‘devops’ or ‘db admin’ is.
It literally is, and has been for quite a while :D Enterprise level email admins make a pretty penny eheheh.
I remember working on sendmail back in the day. I had skills then, but mastering sendmail would elevate you to be the guru on the mountain. I struggled to the foothills and managed enough to maintain it, only scratching the surface. There was and is a lot there. The O’reilly sendmail book was the thickest of my collection and I might even still have it.
That book was likely a huge boost to my career. My first tech job was for a very small shop and the owner insisted that everything run Solaris. Which meant sendmail all day long.
That book got me through some rough times. Fucking sendmail milters … in 2000.
I share your pain!
This really saddens me. Email is such a fundamentally good and open protocol. The only reason people don’t like it is because of big tech’s shenanigans.
I run an email service called Port87. I invite you to try it and see if it can convince you that email is actually a great technology, when detached from big tech slop. It’s got some really killer features that make it great for organization and preventing spam. You can also tell it that on certain addresses, it should completely ignore the strict auth requirements it usually has, so it will accept email from your own services without you having to set up all the extra bullshit that’s meant for stuff that matters more.
I was told about this one but never actually tried it. I am more hellbent on setting up my own server so I never have to migrate from anywhere.
If you have your own domain, you won’t ever have to migrate addresses, just possibly providers.
I do have one yeah. I’ll have to take a look.
Running your own email server is easy.
Getting your email accepted by other servers is hard.
Hosting anything publicly requires a significant amount of hardening.
Neither of those two tasks are easy or low maintenance. I self host almost everything and I’ve run my own mail server (with occasional rejection). It’s not worth it for me; I now use a commercial, paid provider for email.
I prefer to follow the advice from people who actually set up and maintain email servers: “Fucking don’t. It’s not worth it.”
Just get a custom domain and run it through an existing email provider.
I hate that it’s come to this, but you are right.
It’s not that it’s too difficult, it’s that there are too many things beyond your control due to the central duopoly of Google and Microsoft for email. If you end up in their bad graces it’s hard to get out, and they don’t care about you, there’s no support or someone to talk to to get off the ban list.
Would you care to give some additional context here? I haven’t had the itch to host my own e-mail, but what kinds of misfortune do you encounter when you’re not in the good graces of Google of Microsoft? And what could land you in that situation?
Mostly reputation of your IP address and domain, things which are hard to untangle. If you manage to get a clean IP you might be all clear.
There’s other configurations that are required and if not right can harm your reputation, it isn’t something you can set and forget.
What is your reputation in this context? And what does losing it cost you?
Deliverability to major providers like Google or Microsoft. Can be just getting your emails flagged as spam, or them being sikently dropped and never delivered even to spam. Making it impossible know if your emails are being ignored by the recipient or not even delivered to their inbox. It’s also impossible to troubleshoot.
Maybe you said so in some lingo that’s foreign to me, but what upsets that reputation? What kinds of configurations do they not like, and why is it not set and forget? Sorry for asking for a dissertation, but I never had any idea e-mail could be more complicated than set and forget.
There are a few standards now, DKIM, SFP, DMARC, maybe more now, I don’t know. If you send emails without these configured correctly the reputation of the domain and IP are lowered.
Past some internal threshold, you go from inbox to spam, and from spam to silently dropped.
Further, if you send too many emails in a short time, or more emails than usual, your reputation is lowered.
I’m sure there’s more, but these are the kind of things that make it difficult. You make a config error, don’t realize, then people start not getting your emails. You fix the config, but there’s no way to get the reputation back and nobody at Microsoft or Google to ask to re-evaluate you.
Yes exactly. For me, I could figure it out given enough weekends. But screw that. For my wife, my kids, my mom and dad, those things are hyroglyphics.
I’ve been running my own eMail server for almost a quarter century, and I have no clue what all the fuss is about.
Sure, providers are getting very picky about what domains that they will receive eMails from. But that’s why I have gMail, Yahoo, and Microsoft webmail accounts - so I can train their systems by exchanging emails once a quarter.
And yes, you do have to be running whitelists and blacklists and tarpits and have a good Fail2Ban in place. And good geoIP system if you want to cut out regions that you are unlikely to ever have legitimate mail originate from. But that’s just common sense security.
I outsourced my email to a provider.
Works great and only costs me 8€ per month for not having to wrestle IP spamlists, mailserver maintenance and reachability.Yeah, hosting your own email server is pretty tough.
I think something like https://migadu.com/ might be more in the middle of hosting your own server and purely using someone else’s frontend.
I just switched to migadu and found it painless and easy, I also run an email server with mail-in-a-box, which is great.
I gave their self-hosted version a go and got stuck with the gmail connection. For Auth2.0 they’ve built some new bullshit. I think I gotta create an app to pretend I’m a dev, then use that app and password to allow it on my security settings… Google is such a bunch of shit assholes. Fuck Google! With a splintered rusty corrugate hose. Assholes. Who is gonna do that? Nobody. It’s just a tiny bit more than whatever technical knowledge I’m willing to spend cells on. Nah, I’m done.
I like email.
I pay for my own domain. I pay a privacy focused European provider for email and they let me use my own domain. I use an European DNS provider.
So I have email addresses with my own domain and the setup is pretty straightforward and I can use webmail or a desktop|mobile client.
Proton or Tuta mail. Supports aliasing so you can make unique email addresses per website, and trash them if you get spammed.
Singing up for a paid account you also get VPN, drive storage, password manager, docs, sheets, AI chat (I know), calendar, meetings and authenticator.
Just use mailbox.org or posteo.de . Using one of those providers is so much better than a Google mail address but so easier than hosting your own mail server.
Yep honestly paying for posteo (fully foss back-end) is worth it. Self-hosting email is on the hardest side, not impossible but require more time and knowledge than many other services.
just get a trustworthy hoster and a good client application. Boom, most of the benefits with none of the headache.
And yeah, E-Mail is, what a decade of expanding scope does to you.
A decade? Email has been around longer than the web. Roughly forty years.
Ok, two decades.
As much as I would like 1981 to only be two decades ago, I’m afraid it was four and a half decades ago.
A generation?
It’s not really worth the trouble to try to host your own e-mail. There are lots of e-mail hosts that you can use with your own domain. A few of them are free and there are plenty of low cost ones. As long as you use your own domain, you can switch hosts whenever you want and keep your addresses.
Personally I don’t self-host email :
- For personal emails, I use posteo.de
- For accounts, I use alias vault
You don’t have to use Gmail. There are many, many other options.
Thanks for introducing me to posteo, was looking for something to leave proton for
Just get a domain and point it at a provider. Now you’re not locked in and can switch at will upon enshittification. Get one of the offline mail archive services like OpenArchiver. Job done.