Skip Navigation
129 comments

  • I'm oldschool.

    I've had my own domains and mail servers for the past 3 decades and will maintain them for as long as I live.

    And these days, all but the storage runs of Pi3, so it's barely using any power either.

    • How is your deliverability? I've heard private servers are often blocked outright by the big providers but don't have any first hand experience with it myself.

      • Never had any big issues, as there have always been providers here that stood by having an open network for its subscribers, even in the dialup age.

        And because they existed, the major providers don't tend to do that either (at least not anymore).

        Most ludicrous thing is that the one time I DID have issues with port blocks (port 21/53/80/443 aka ftp/dns/http/https) was the first time I switched from a domestic line to a business one with one of the largest providers here. They did that as a default unless you called them to unblock everything.

        But in the past decade, on fiber, never had an issue, the providers that were first to deliver fiber were new ones that broke from two of the major ISPs respectively owning ALL the coax and ALL the copper in the country, which allowed them to set their own rules.

        And their competitive edge wasn't on price, but on giving you a ludicrously fast and stable connection with the only limitation being what the fiber could carry, although now, when the major ISPs are also finally providing fiber, their pricing compared to my own ISP is kinda ludicrous.

        My current ISPs advertised philosophy is "security is your responsibility, a stable fast connection ours". And so far, they've held true to that.

        Besides that, almost as long, I first rented and now own a box at a datacenter, which among its secondary tasks runs a backup NS and backup MX as I had the box anyway. To this date, the only times that backup had to do anything was when I was moving and when there are announced network maintenance or other works (of which the longest I can remember was 1 hour and only happen 2 times per year).

        I get that if I lived in the US, this would not be quite as practical to achieve.

        I worked for a US ISP in the early 00's, was looking to provide WIFI in rural Texas areas. Setup the hardware and backend for them. Became quickly apparent from what they were demanding from the backend, that their focus wasn't particularly to bring access to rural areas, but to milk the shit out of providing WIFI to rural areas.

        Don't get me wrong tho, I still have several Gmail addresses that are as old as the service itself is. I rather use a gmail address to sign up to sites and have them deal with the subsequent deluge of spam, than to have that shit tax my own system :P

      • We use cPanel emails at work... don't ask, please 😭😂. Since we've got off a couple of large website hosting platforms it appears to be smooth sailing.

        We're currently hosting our emails with a small web hosting provider, 'only 250k' websites are hosted with them. They apparently use SSDs for customer data and boy oh boy is that apparent. Emails are sync'd, sent, and received faster than any other cPanel emails we've been on. We've only been with them for about 1-1.5 years, so something might come up one day.

        I know it's not quite self hosting, but it's quite close to it.

  • Proton (free - 1GB storage, 500MB before doing 4 "tasks") for family, friends, and business types uses, although I'd rather have an integrated calendar (instead of it being a separate app).

    Tutanota (free - 1GB storage) for bills, purchases, etc., basically everything else, because I'm never going to say "my email is xxxxx@TUTAmail.com" to anyone I know, especially business acquaintances. So far, I like Tutanota more than Proton, especially the integrated calendar, but that name...... sounds like something my mother or grandparents were scammed into using.

    On desktop, I'm currently using Thunderbird (TB) for a couple of older gmail accounts (in the process of transitioning away from), although I hate the recent update to TB. Haven't tried the Tutanota desktop app yet, but web version of email & calendar work adequately. Maybe I'll transition from TB now, after their recent changes.

    Considered mailbox.org, but I'm not going to pay for it (no free version), especially when they don't at least have a cell app. Skiff may be worth looking at. Can't recall why I didn't try them.

    EDIT: I've now installed Skiff (free - 10GB) as well and liking it so far. Using webmail seems easy and straight forward, cell app looks about the same (but haven't spent too much time on it yet). REALLY like that you basically get 4 email accounts (1 main and 3 alias account names), which is different than Tutanota and Proton. With the different aliases, this gives me an option to use Skiff for everything (if I choose to "put everything in one basket" at some point). Skiff sounds a little better than "Tuta" for business acquaintances as well, but not by much. No integrated calendar, but significantly larger storage is a plus.

  • Any email with cock in the name will trigger filtering. It also has the side effect of making me unemployable

  • I'm in the process of migrating to Proton from Gmail and Outlook. All 4 mailboxes imported, now just the tedious job of updating credentials on all the websites remains...

  • I use runbox. It costs money, but is affordable. They also take privacy and security seriously, and they take steps to help the environment when possible.

    • First runbox user I've seen in the wild. +1 for runbox, it has worked great for in the last ~6 years or so.

      The 100 aliases you get are very useful. The fact it costs money may be a turn off for many, but I'd personally wouldn't trust a privacy statement from a closed source free service.

    • Keep in mind that runbox 7 is the only Foss option. The other one is proprietary

      • How do you think it compares to Posteo? I mainly chose them because environmental awareness, privacy consciousness and usage of libre software.

  • I switched to hosting my own inbound mail. I mostly switched because after trying a few providers they almost all dropped some email that I wanted (not Spam, completely dropped) so I set up my own. It is quite nice to have full control over configuration, filtering, backups and whatever else.

    Right now I am using a paid rely to send, but maybe I'll see how my IP's reputation at some point.

  • Paid Proton Mail with my own domain name and own PGP keypair. Although it now has a way to securely search mail, I use the bridge service to allow Betterbird mail to sync my mail to my PC for searching.

  • ProtonMail because they're at the very least non-intrusive and don't have a track record of snooping through emails, google im looking at you mf

  • If I remember correctly cock.li is also hosting some really bad Nazi domains and has apparently no problem with that...

129 comments