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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 10 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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[–] ChrislyBear 73 points 10 months ago (29 children)

Do NOT self-host email! In the long run, you'll forget a security patch, someone breaches your server, blasts out spam and you'll end up on every blacklist imaginable with your domain and server.

Buy a domain, DON'T use GoDaddy, they are bastards. I'd suggest OVH for European domains or Cloudflare for international ones.

After you have your domain, register with "Microsoft 365" or "Google Workspace" (I'd avoid Google, they don't have a stable offering) or any other E-Mail-Provider that allows custom domains.

Follow their instructions on how to connect your domain to their service (a few MX and TXT records usually suffice) and you're done.

After that, you can spin up a VPS and try out new stuff and connect it also to your domain (A and CNAMR records).

[–] grepe 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

All good advice. I'd recommended protonmail for mail hosting - got very good experience with them and the onky downside is you have to use their client.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I was using proton for a while, but they are pretty expensive if you want features like catchall and more aliases, on top of restricting clients.

Migadu offers complete email freedom for $20 ($10 for students) a year, unlimited accounts, aliases, identities, etc. I've been very happy with them.

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