I’m contemplating taking control of my email by moving away from mainstream providers like Gmail or Outlook. What self-hosted email services have you tried, and which ones do you find most reliable and user-friendly? Are there any challenges or advantages you’ve encountered in making the switch?
Skiff
I use postfix, dovecot and snappymail. Very happy.
I already had a well-configured postfix (DKIM, DMARC) for web applications, so adding dovecot was easy. It’s also really powerful, you can define who gets mailboxes in scripts. I tried going with providers but I couldn’t get this kind of power.
On-Prem Exchange Server. Way better than anything else.
https://proton.me/ is the direction I have recently chosen to migrate away from Gmail. They natively support PGP (for the super paranoid) and also has extra perks like VPN and their own version of Drive. Is it truly any more secure than Google? Who really knows, but I am tired of Google scraping thru my emails to fish out directed advertising. It would be one thing if the accounts were unpaid and this was just another way to generate revenue for the service, but with the amount of storage utilized, it was paid for (on multiple accounts). Proton provided a nice feature to import all the Gmail information including contacts and calendar. There was one oddity with importing into the calendar, thinking it had something to do with the way Google ties contact info into calendar (birthdays and such). There are many choices, even rolling your own mail server if you have the time.
If you know what you’re doing, MailCheap is an option. I picked that a few years ago and MXroute was a very close second choice for me.
Self hosting with mailcow.
Alternatively proton.me
If you’re not hosting yourself (don’t), Zoho is my suggestion.
I really like Zoho mail. It’s free to setup with your own domain email. I get 5 inboxes for free, which would be enough for a small business. They get 5GB of storage for free. They don’t allow mail clients to be used outside of their own mail clients which is good enough for me unless you pay a subscription. They have both a desktop and mobile app for their mail service.
So far, I’ve used it for personal business and it’s not getting spammed to death. I would love to start a business by providing IT applications, mail setup services and hardware services for existing local businesses.
Mailcow is pretty straightforward to setup and has good documentation. No matter what you choose though be prepared to put a decent amount of work into it. I also recommend using an SMTP relay like SendGrid or Mailgun. That way you don’t have to worry about deliverability as much. If you’re not planning on sending a lot of email (<100 emails a day for SendGrid) you can use their free tiers.
Selfhosting is always best. I just cannot trust remote providers with my mails. Only caviat is you usually need a small server with static IP, most providers block emails delivered from ISPs.
Proton Mail
I can’t remember if it was Proton, but i remember reading about some laws being approved where (I think) Proton servers are that would make them comply for disclosure if necessary. Not that it matters much unless you’re doing illegal stuff, i believe i found this while researching the differences between Tuta and Proton.
Might not be the answer you are looking for: I would strongly advise against self-hosting your main email, especially if you are thinking about doing it on an IP address from a residential ISP or VPS/cloud provider. Unfortunately those kind of addresses have bad reputations for spam, and you will run in to significant deliverability issues at minimum. Some providers flat out block port 25, which makes sending and receiving unauthenticated email impossible (which is required to operate an “email provider”).
Just need to check it first (port 25) and use providers with good reputation. Many years I got many VPS-based mailservers without any problems with IP block or similar problems. Just need to make initial setup of you server correctly. Reputation services are not banning big ranges of IP addresses because of one stupid-spam server in providers network. But if you can’t deny free relay on your host, it’s just your problem and no problem of your provider.
Mail in a box or poste.io
3rd for MIAB. I use Linode. I believe most ISP’s restrict access to mail ports so running at home is probably not possible.
This is a generalization that not useful to keep repeating. Better advice would be check to be sure YOUR ISP allows access to the ports you need.