Hey guys,
after looking into selfhosting email it seems to me that it’s probably better if I use an existing email hoster like Namecheap or Porkbun.
Now I saw that Porkbun doesn’t offer catchall emails so I can’t use it for my usecase.
Do you guys have any recommendations for a reasonably priced email hoster for a custom domain that offers all basic features like catchall? The purpose is for one domain I use for my personal stuff and one for a small side hustle/ small business.
Thanks so much in advance for your help!
ProtonMail has been my go to, really fantastic service, you get simplelogin as well and can add custom domains up to 10 iirc. And the VPN is top tier too.
I used to self host email and got sick of my emails never getting through. Email is federated in theory, but pretty centralized in practice. Paying for Proton was definitely worth it.
It really is depressingly hard to send email from most IPs these days. Somewhere along the lines we switched from black lists to white lists.
Someone shared this post about ProtonMail the other day and thought I should share here as well.
An interesting read - thanks for sharing.
After reading that post and the linked github issues, with the latest updates and comments from the last 24 hours. Here’s the TL;DR:
- This is only relevant if you want to use an email client with Proton Bridge.
- If you’re just using Proton for encryption and signing (you can use the same PGP outside of proton too) then there is no issue at all.
- If you want an external tool (like a hardware yubikey) to decrypt your messages that someone else has sent to you using the public key that corresponds to the external tool there will be signature validation shenanigans. This is because Proton expects to be the only entity doing any encryption.This is an important issue for those that need to send encrypted emails (and signatures) with specific keys.
- It is not an issue for anyone using Proton email for a secure email service even if they want to use an external email client on desktop (like Thunderbird) with Proton Bridge.
Please correct me if I missed something.
CC: @howlingecko@sh.itjust.works
You got it right, lots of drama, not really anything to worry about unless you’re very fringe and have people you email via PGP with “super secure” PGP keys (and honestly I’d trust Proton more than I’d trust most people to roll their own PGP… it’s hard stuff to get PGP right).
I have Protonmail rolled together with AnonAddy and that gives me all the aliases I could ever want.
How good is spam detection on ProtonMail? Especially compared to some of the big players like GMail?
Edit: I moved my primary email address to ProtonMail. Spam-Filtering is simply not good. About 50% get through just fine, even if it’s very easily identifiable as Spam / Phishing. I love everything else about ProtonMail but Spam-Filtering is simply not good despite relatively positive reviews I found about it.
Pretty damn good. I switched from Gmail, which afaik is amongst the best.
I hosted email professionally and for myself both, from the old days writing send mail rules in vi to turnkey shit. Absolute not worth the substantial hassle. Doesn’t scale small. The auth and security stuff is a PITA, then you find one thing was wrong and other domains were silently dropping all your mail, never delivered. Ugh. Protonmail it is.
I recommend fastmail.com though they do have done shortcomings that you need to consider such as the fact that they’re based in Australia (five eyes country) and have servers in the USA. Their advantage is a slick interface, fantastic app based on JMAP, and just generally being super convenient. They allow catch all addresses, masked emails, custom domain etc. I find them super convenient.
Another upvote or seven for fastmail.com - I spent a little too much time spinning my personal domain hosting through Fastmail, Tutanota, Proton, mailbox.org… and then came back full circle to Fastmail.
Their shortcomings, if you’re concerned about privacy, are listed right above^^^ but I don’t think you can find a better email hosting provider for the pricing.
Email isn’t that secure anyway (don’t use email if your life or freedom depends on it), so I don’t see that as much as a downside.
I have a couple domains that are very low volume for outgoing mail. I use Migadu. I’m happy with their cheapest tier ($19/year for both domains). They have catch-alls and many other nice features.
Edit: They have no hard limits on the number of addresses, users, or domains and such. They just want you to be reasonable. You choose a tier based on your average quantity of outgoing mails per day. Again, there are no hard limits; they won’t cut you off unless you abuse the system.
Seconding Migadu! I’ve had them for about 3 years now and never had a problem.
I’ve been happy as well with migadu for the time I’ve been using it ~3 years. Have different mailboxes, and I used aliases for pretty much every website I sign up with.
I use Fastmail and it’s pretty reasonable, has some nice tie-ins with 1Password, alias emails, etc.
I’ve been very happy with mxroute for quite a few years now. They have a summer deal going on for $40 a year for unlimited domains and accounts, you’re only limited by storage (100GB) and outgoing emails per hour.
t would be helpful to know what you consider basic features you want the host to support, but catchall works.I self-host my main email account, but use MXRoute as an outbound relay. Works great.
I do have some email accounts that use MXRoute. The Crossbox webmail system they use is very good.
Same here, very happy about mxroute, they even have a plan where you pay once for lifetime account.
How good is mxroute at blocking spam correctly?
+1 for mxroute. Happy customer since last black Friday. No fuss and just works (after reading the how-to). Also spam detection is good.
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Proton mail offers catchall, assuming you mean what I think you do. Basically I can receive mail sent to anything@mydomain.com, though my account only has 5 named accounts that I can send from.
I use Proton mail and Anonaddy.
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I already posted that I recommend fastmail elsewhere in this thread, but you raised so many good points that it reminded me of some extra points :)
Fastmail offers granular, per-app passwords – I have a single password which has read-only access to IMAP in order to back up all the data on a timer. This feature is missing from many (many) other email providers - using the 80/20 rule, if they even offer it it’s a single password with full access (Mailfence, for example)
Since this community is about selfhosting I think it’s worth pointing out that this is AMAZING for selfhosting. I have all me selfhosted services sending e-mail via fastmail’s SMTP. With per-app passwords I don’t need to store my normal e-mail password and the apps can be limited to SMTP only (so no read access). And in case of compromise you can revoke permissions on a per-app granularity.
Fastmail offers full CardDAV (contacts) and CalDAV (calendar) access, which makes plugging it into any other app that supports this very easy - their DNS wizard helps you set up the service records. I use “DavX5” on my Android to sync all Contacts and Calendar outside of using the Fastmail app (which is a self contained app on Android, it’s not too bad)
Fastmail has become my contacts app now - it’s really great to have all your e-mail and contacts in the same place. The contacts don’t even need to have an e-mail address - I have a lot of contacts stored for whom I only have a phone number. I sync to android using the same DavX5 app and then immediately have these contacts in whatsapp and signal.
I self host my imap Server that my clients access. I have a minutely cron job that first fetches, then deletes, the emails from my mail provider.
I don’t self host smtp.
With that I have all the advantages of self hosted email, but no integration problems.
Purelymail.com has been great for me for years. Insanely cheap and just works.
It’s great, I just wish the admin UI was better somehow. Especially the routing page quickly gets out of hand.
I can’t recommend Migadu enough. I’m on the $99/year plan and have dozens of domains and clients with their own domains too, it’s easy to manage and does everything I need it to.
Proton and fastmail you can use custom domains. I only have experience using fastmail. They provide great instructions for the settings in cloudflare (mx records, etc). My domain is purchased through namecheap.
I can receive mail on *@mydomain.com and I can send email from any thing I want ad-hoc (anything@mydomain.com or anything@anything.mydomain.com)
I thought about selfhosting as well, but the internet concensus was it can be a hassle with your email getting rejected.
Whatever hosting service you’re going to use, if you’re not afraid of a little bit of Lua coding, consider using
imapfilter– it’s a swiss knife for backups, pre-sorting, hooks and migration.imapfilter is a (criminally underrated, IMO) tool for writing e-mail rules in Lua, which allow you to do tons of things, but my favorite is migrating e-mail, regardless of account.
See, unlike most filtering/sorting systems which are either completely proprietary or limited to single account (exportable as Sieve, if you’re lucky), imapfilter does not care where each “end” of the rule is: you can write rule that migrates from account1/folder1 to account2/folder3.
This allows you to completely decouple any sorting, pre-processing, hook or backup system from the actual locations or providers you happen to be using, as well as it allows you to combine any number of locations in any simple or complex way you need. Whatever system you will end up creating will stay with you as long (as you can use IMAP locations), so you can really focus on making it work long-term and have it fit into the big picture.
I’ve been using it for almost 10 years and ever since it has changed my whole world of e-mail. I have constant set of rules that take e-mails from set of inboxes (each box for different purpose, each on different provider, for reasons) and sort them to folders on my “actual” account, where I get to read them on my terms. I also have several of rules that run custom scripts exporting CSV’s, etc. (The rules are Lua programs, after all, so sky is the limit.) If I ever need to migrate my domain to another service (believe it or not, happened more than once in 10 years), all I need to do is set up the new account as base for the rules, but all of my rules are always going to be preserved.
In my past work I actually used imapfilter to move all IMAP from company Gmail to a locally maintained (on company laptop) Dovecot instance so that I could eventually use a sane client to get my work done. (And because the instance was local, I could access my e-mail offline with best possible speed.) One could do a similar thing with personal/freelance e-mail – just run Dovecot somewhere at a trusted place (you won’t be sending/receiving e-mails here, you will be only using IMAP to IMAP commands, so none of the horrors of self-hosting e-mail apply) and use imapfilter to route all email there, then back up your dovecot folder and you’re all set.
Except for need of coding, the disadvantage is that, I need an independent machine that runs 24/7 in order to keep sorting the e-mail (I do it cron-based but you can also do it continually) but that has not been a problem for me as I’m the self-hosting-nerd that’s going to have such machine anyway.
Again, perhaps with more clarity:
With imapfilter you can
- choose where you will host your “actual” e-mail, let’s say you choose according to best spam filter.
- choose where you will store your e-mail long-term.
- choose where you will access the e-mail for everyday use (this could be several separate accounts if you wanted to eg. use one on your phone and another one on your workstation)
- choose where you will run imapfilter and any script hooks
- start building your rules.
1-3 could be same provider or different providers, including your custom dovecot instance, you will simply choose based on convenience and limits. If you ever need to change one of the endpoints (providers), you just need to rewrite them in your ~/.imapfilter/config.lua. (And migrate, which can be done using imapfilter or manually using any sane client, eg. Claws Mail…)
