I was thinking about how to improve my email situation, because at the moment I am using an address of a commercial mail provider, which obviously brings some concerns of lock-in.

While fully self-hosting the email is an option, I am a bit wary of this, because having a working email is very critical and I do trust the commercial providers to give better uptime and reliability than my old server in the closet. Does anyone have experience hosting an email service and what is it like/could you recommend it?

The other option that I am more inclined to is having the email hosted by some cloud provider, but using an address under my personal domain name. The point would be of course that I could change the email provider while keeping the address. Which providers supporting this could you recommend? What is the process like linking a domain to an email host?

  • activistPnk@slrpnk.net
    2·
    17 hours ago

    Consider self-hosting HALF the service. Something like this:

    Outbound

    local Postfix on dynamic IP → relay (optional and configurable) → recipient

    You can configure Postfix to use a relay depending on the recipient. E.g. if you need to reach alice@outlook.com, MS will reject your dynamic IP. But if you have bob@outlook.com, you can tell Postfix to relay via MS servers using your bob@outlook.com account for all *@outlook.com recipients. And yes, you can still use a different vanity address in the FROM: field, like Gobbel2000@nerds.org, if that’s what you want to be known as. You can freetype whatever your want as the FROM: address if you use a good MUA like mutt.

    You can even hack postfix to send over Tor. And you can make it possible to support *.onion email addresses, which is something that no non-self-hosted service offers.

    When I email someone for the 1st time, say it’s [email protected], I first configure my mail server to relay to @someunknownneverseensvc.xyz over Tor. If that fails (and it often does), I configure Postfix to directly send to that server from my dynamic IP (or VPN if I have that running). That’s the default, in fact. If that fails, then I can cave-in and compromise my privacy by relaying through a 3rd party, if I choose. Most importantly, I am in control. If I really want to send the msg but I really do not want an additional MitM, I may be able to create an acct on @someunknownneverseensvc.xyz and then use that as a relay to recipients on that host.

    Rise-up has an onion SMTP server. So if you have a riseup acct you could use their onion as a relay.

    Inbound

    (your acct @ rise-up or disroot.org or danwin1210.de or autistici) → POP3 onion using fetchmail → local Postfix → dovecote or procmail → local files read by your MUA of choice

    You avoid a lot of complexity and labor by not maintaining a WAN-listening server. Though you still have a fair amount of effort in configuring your junk, you need not do all the configuration up front. You can do it on a piecemeal per-outbound msg basis to spread your config effort out over time. Of course you need to use a forwarding service or do some DNS arrangements if you want an address that does not tie you to an ESP.

    This approach relieves you of the reliability problem… you need not maintain a server always online, up, and listening. But of course you lose some privacy because all your inbound traffic is seen by your ESP. At least you can potentially circumvent your ESP on outbound mail.

    BTW, you might want to crosspost to [email protected]

    (update) my complaint with Postfix: no Tor support out of the box

    Postfix needs some hacking to get it to work over Tor. As old as Postfix and Tor both are, they should work together out of the box.