I know there are alternatives like proton mail, tutamail, mailbox.org, etc… But what would be the issue if I create an email using my personal domain, stored in my hosting… maybe encryption? It seems that no-one even consider this option, but I am not sure why…
What would you suggest?
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Owning a domain for yourself and having a provider send/receive email on your behalf is a common choice, and it has its own benefits such as being able to migrate to other providers easily. As long as you renew your domain properly, it should be fine. Though do note that only you would use that domain, so anyone would know it was you who sent that email.
Owning a domain for yourself AND handling email sending/receiving can be challenging because there’s a chance your email gets filtered as spam, and the receiver doesn’t get what you sent. It’s also possible that your server goes down, and the email sent to you doesn’t arrive properly, though the email server usually try to send again a number of times before giving up.
If you are confident about setting a server, I can personally recommend Mailcow. As long as you set up SPF, DKIM, DMARC, it should pass most spam filter including Gmail. If you don’t want to deal with the potential headache, getting a provider to send/receive emails for you is a good choice too.
Thanks for the clear explanation!!! 🙌
I bought a domain through cloud flare qand use them for dns, I use Fastmail as my mail service.
Fairly simple setup.
Same, but with tuta for service. It works fine.
I didn’t go with tuta or proton because they require a 3rd party plugin and part of my use case is playing https://triplea-game.org/
Does Proton bridge work? I know nothing about that game.
Prooooobably but I was also working with other users who are tech illiterate and setting up even an app password for a mail client is almost a bridge too far, so another plugin/program is asking them a lot unfortunately.
If I need encryption I can encrypt locally and utilize traditional encryption methods.
Wait, is everyone using the same account or something? Why don’t they just use whatever email account they already use?
Proton just sends and accepts regular, unencrypted email, which is totally fine for something like a casual game. Whether you use Proton or something else is irrelevant, all that matters is that your end works.
I’m not the only user of my domain, I have other users.
I don’t want to use Google.
My use case unfortunately meant proton and Tutanoa did not work.
I use Addy.io with my own domain. The reason is that I don’t want to depend on Addyio.
If you mean self-hosting email, then good luck.
It’s a lottery with the IP and even the IP space you get, whether anyone will actually receive your emails.
I hosted my own for a few years, but god fed up telling everyone to dig through their junk folder for my emails, and not being responded to very often, probably because of just that.
Maybe some providers have it better, but I tried a few and each was just not good. I really think Microsoft, Amazon, Google and other big players have intentionally separated the good, trusted IPs, ones they use for email services specifically, and made the other worse
I’ve been using my own cloud-hosted SMTP relay and Zimbra server for over a decade now, and I love it.
There can be a bit of a learning curve, and in some cases sites won’t accept mail from cloud-hosted domains. I add those domains to a rule in sendmail that sends those domains through Amazon SES, and then they get accepted.
If you do go this route, just make sure that your recovery emails or 2FA for things like your registrar go somewhere else. If your cloud provider pulls the plug on you or something you don’t want to be stuck waiting for an email that can’t arrive.
I love the level of control that I have over my email and wouldn’t have it any other way.
tl;dr: steep learning curve, but worth it in the long run. Keep gmail as a recovery/2FA account or something, though.
What benefits do you get from selfhosting?
One is that I can keep family email (everyone on the server) in the same ecosystem, so private information send between family members isn’t as likely to leak.
Another is also privacy – my mail isn’t being used to build a profile about me.
I also like the control and the ability to look at logs. If I don’t get an email, I can look at the server and figure out why it didn’t show up. It just provides more information for me.
I have my own domain and pay for Zoho to host my email. It works well aside from the occasional site that refuses to accept my email as valid because it’s not a .com/org domain.
I’ve done this for years.
One of the benefits is that you can always just set up Gmail to pull from Pop and send with SMTP anytime if you’re not ready to give up Gmail yet and then just turn it off when you are without the need to announce a change in email.
You can point your domain on any hoster like mailbox.org. There are a lot of benefits at not hosting your own mailserver.
A major downside is that email is not encrypted and Email usually contains very sensitive personal information.
Get your own domain. Don’t host your own.
I’ve had the same domain on gmail, proton and now purelymail.
Running a mail infrastructure properly is a complex problem. I would not recommend it for most people. There’s a reason most companies outsource it these days.
