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-hosting email is not at all easy, and I'd recommend paying for hosted email from a service that lets you use a custom domain. Most will let you have multiple inboxes, although this may cost extra.
Then, just buy a domain (NameCheap is fine) and point your MX records at the email provider.
Cloudflare sells domains at cost. If you use apple devices and pay for iCloud+ ($1.99 a month for the cheapest plan), you can get email hosting for your domain for the entire family + a catch all address.
You can run an email host yourself but it is going to cost more in time and effort to maintain than just paying for hosting. It’s not very professional if your messages go to spam due to low reputation or if you miss a message/someone gets a bounce back because the container running your mail server was down and you didn’t realize
Run mail on a custom domain for fun, to learn what it takes, but don’t do it for mail that really matters
I use both. I have a self hosted docker compose instance of mailcow, which alerts me when an update is available.
I also use protonmail as well.
Self hosting was a pain in the ass to get working, but I've had no issues with it once up. I tossed it behind a reverse proxy to keep it from directly touching the internet.
Based on my personal experience, id say gmail, you only need a domain I used namecheap without any issue. You register with that on google, some settings you set on namecheap , it guides you all the way then you pay the lowest monthly fee, I pay 5.20 euros per month for my company's mail.
You set up a main email then you can setup any number of aliases for yourself I think, you can also create group emails and assign yourself to it
If you ever decide to host your own, via VPS or sth consider checking docker-mailserver and watchtower. First takes care of the mail stuff and the second updates your containers frequently so you will not have to manually update to new versions of the container (for security patches etc.).
My father still has a gmail account for all of our last names.
Friends don't let friends self host email.
Easy enough to make it work, but maintaining 100% uptime and 100% deliverability is very difficult.