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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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Self-hosted or personal email solutions? (self.selfhosted)

submitted 11 months ago by avguser to c/selfhosted

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I have a unique name, think John Doe, and I'm hoping to create a unique and "professional" looking email account like [email protected] or [email protected]. Since my name is common, all reasonable permutations are taken. I was considering purchasing a domain with something unique, then making personal family email accounts for [email protected] [email protected] etc.

Consider that I'm starting from scratch (I am). Is there a preferred domain registrar, are GoDaddy or NameCheap good enough? Are there prebuilt services I can just point my domain to or do I need to spin up a VPS and install my own services? Are there concerns tying my accounts to a service that might go under or are some "too big to fail"?

I can expand what hangs off the domain later, but for now I just need a way to make my own email addresses and use them with the relative ease of Gmail or others. Thanks in advance!!

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I find there is less management overhead regarding inboxes with SL, compared to creating, managing and logging into multiple receiving addresses under a real mail server.

Sure, you can set one mail account on your domain and define it as catch all, but then won't be able to send from these names.

Or you can create accounts you want, but then cannot quickly create new inboxes without opening your control dashboard.

Obviously, if you want to register with a service anonymously, you'd use one of the SL domains, which I do plenty too!

And at the end of the chain, all messages run into the same singular Google inbox, making it easier for me to manage all messages from all domains.

I'm sure paid email hosters will have their own advantages, but as I said at the beginning of my original comment, I want to show an alternative solution, not a better solution.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

There are mail providers that let you use anything as a "from" address as long as it's @yourdomain. I mean why shouldn't they, it's your domain; it's a silly restriction in the first place. On Migadu it's called "wildcard sender" and once you activate it for a mailbox its user can send as [email protected] (even if it doesn't exist; they warn you to set up an alias or catch-all for it but let you shoot yourself in the foot).

Migadu also lets you define wildcard aliases (like shopping.at.*@your.domain) which are a good balance of both worlds: it's not a full catch-all but also you can make them up on the fly without having to go into your settings every time.