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A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

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Email server thru cloudflare (self.selfhosted)

submitted 3 months ago by werefreeatlast to c/selfhosted

23 comments fedilink hide all child comments

It's a bad title, but I'm trying to figure out how to describe what I want.

First, I got my photoprism working thru cloudflare. Now, on the same domain I would like an email address.

So mysite.com gets routed to 56.654.234.12 let's say by cloudflare such that a global user never sees my ip. But mail.mysite.com that's different, they don't proxy email so if you do a reverse lookup you can find the origin IP.

I heard about tunnels so I stupidly signed up for that, only to learn that a tunnel just lets you into an internal network. So an SMTP server can't get emails from outside that way.

Ideally, somehow I could setup one user at Gmail or proton mail, then somehow setup the same or different [email protected] and I could then use mailu, mailcow, mail docker to house my [email protected] which routes mail thru Gmail or protonmail. I know all this makes little sense because I don't know the proper way, so that's my question for you smart people who have done this twice over. Could someone point me to the best way of setting up a local mail server that routes thru cloudflare but is not easily reverse looked up? Is that even a problem at all?

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[–] Ferawyn 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Have a look at https://forwardemail.net/. It's a service that handles accepting (and optionally sending) email on your domain, and forwarding any received mail to other backend services, like a gmail account. All you need to do is set some DNS records, like MX and their servers will handle everything. It works fine with domains hosted on cloudflare, and has excellent howto's to get everything set up and running.

Edit: The great thing about this service, imho, is their guides. They don't just have a static howto, they template in your information into the exact string you need to copy/paste into the service provider's web interface. Want to encrypt your plaintext TXT records? There's a button for that on the guide. Want to learn how to get around a port 25 ISP block, they have a guide for that. Want to set up proper Send-As from Gmail using their SMTP server? There's a guide for that. :-)

[–] werefreeatlast 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Looks good but it's basically another place for my emails to be be stuck at for decades. Maybe I'll look at the way they route email.

[–] cybersandwich 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

It might be worth taking a step back and looking at your objective with all of this and why you are doing it in the first place.

If it's for privacy, then unfortunately that ship has sailed when it comes to email. It's the digital equivalent of a post card. It's inherently not private. Nothing you do will make it private. Even services like proton Mail aren't private--unless you only email other people on proton.

I appreciate wanting to control your own destiny with it but there are much more productive things you could be spending your time on the improve your privacy surface area.

[–] werefreeatlast 1 points 3 months ago

I think I'm going to set up my mx record and get docker mail server setup. It's not very clear what I can actually do. Like I don't need an alias. Mostly what I want is to send and receive emails without Gmail in the middle asking for money and scaring the shit out of me with deleting emails, archiving, loosing fidelity, whatever they do. I can come up with 15gigs of free space on my server a bizillion times over, I don't need that heartache in my life. This sort of blackmail should be totally illegal. I consider my self a savvy person but damn, this is hard. Now imagine my mom or my wife or even my kids. It's fucked that we can't escape the G grip easily now that everything revolves around email authentication. It's a tax on everything... banking, joining a forum, keeping pictures from your phone hacked up. Everything! Gmail has got to go.