Self-hosted or personal email solutions?

Do NOT self-host email! In the long run, you'll forget a security patch, someone breaches your server, blasts out spam and you'll end up on every blacklist imaginable with your domain and server.
Buy a domain, DON'T use GoDaddy, they are bastards. I'd suggest OVH for European domains or Cloudflare for international ones.
After you have your domain, register with "Microsoft 365" or "Google Workspace" (I'd avoid Google, they don't have a stable offering) or any other E-Mail-Provider that allows custom domains.
Follow their instructions on how to connect your domain to their service (a few MX and TXT records usually suffice) and you're done.
After that, you can spin up a VPS and try out new stuff and connect it also to your domain (A and CNAMR records).
- That said, you can use a third party service only for sending, but receive mail on your self-hosted server.
  
  I've been successfully using SES for a couple years now without issue.
  
  That's what I'm doing. I have selfhosted E-Mail with YunoHost and send it through SMTP2Go.
- @avguser@lemmy.world
  I'll second not self hosting email unless you're in it for the experience.
  I'd also strongly caution against hosting email for friends and family unless you want to own that relationship for the rest of your life.
  If you do it anyway, you're going to end up locked into whatever solution you decide for a long time, because now you have users who rely on that solution.
  If you still go forward, don't use Google (or msft). Use a dedicated email service. Having your personal domain tied to those services just further complicates the lock in.
  (I did this over a decade ago, with Google, when it was just free vanity domain hosting. I've been trying for years to get my users migrated to Gmail accounts.)
  If I had it all to do over again. I'd probably setup accounts as vanity forwards to a "real" account for people who wanted them. That's easy to maintain, move around, and you're not dealing with migrating peoples oauth to everything when you want to move or stop paying for it.
  
  I have a bunch of users (friends and family) on a bunch of different domains. It's honestly not so bad but yeah, you need a decent dedicated service.
  Migrations aren't simple but aren't that complicated either (just did one last year).
  I mainly need to copy their email over but it's also a good moment to check they're using decent passwords and to have them freshen it.
  I also need to update their webmail and IMAP/SMTP URLs in their bookmark/email apps but I've been playing with DNS CNAMEs for this purpose and it's mostly working ok (aliasing one of my domains to the provider's so I only have to update the DNS which I do anyway for a mail migration).
- All good advice. I'd recommended protonmail for mail hosting - got very good experience with them and the onky downside is you have to use their client.
  
  I was using proton for a while, but they are pretty expensive if you want features like catchall and more aliases, on top of restricting clients.
  Migadu offers complete email freedom for $20 ($10 for students) a year, unlimited accounts, aliases, identities, etc. I've been very happy with them.
- I’d avoid Google, they don’t have a stable offering
  What you you mean by not stable?
  I've been (stuck with) Google Workspace for many, many years - I was grandfathered out from the old G-Suite plans. The biggest issue for me is that all my Play store purchases for my Android are tied to my Workspace's identity, and there's no way to unhook that if I move.
  I want to move. I have serious trust issues with Google. But I can't stop paying for Workspaces, as it means I'd lose all my Android purchases. It's Hotel fucking California.
  But I've always found the email to be stable, reliable, and the spam filtering is top notch (after they acquired and rolled Postini into the service).
  
  I tore that bandwidth off a while ago. Same thing with trust issues and google.
  Since then I set up a family account and use a regular Gmail account for app store purchases so I can change provider at any time. Can share most of my app purchases with family. I don't actually check the gmail email. Just use it for Android services.
  
  I mean, they kill services willy nilly. Sure Gmail will probably survive, but the rest drove me away (Reader, Music, ...).
  Regarding your Android purchases: At the time of my move I went through my list of apps I bought and tallied the ones up, that I still used. It was less than $50 of repurchases.
  Don't let those old purchases hold you back. Cut this old baggage loose.
- FWIW ive used Google for about ten years for email and have never modified my DNS records. They seem extremely stable.
  It's basically a Gmail account with a custom domain.
  
  I did as well, but then I went Microsoft and never looked back. Google's platform still feels like a shitty startup with missing stuff everywhere, compared to Azure (or AWS).
  The only thing I'm missing is Google Photos, but there are self-hosted alternatives out, that I'll try soon.
- If you get your domain from OVH, you get one single mailbox (be it with a lot of aliases, like a different email-address for every service/website you use) for free.
- I'd throw in mailbox.org as a more privacy-focused alternative to Google and Microsoft. Been using them for years without issues. Only their 2FA solution sucks.

Yes you need a domain for sure. But you don’t need a server for it, in fact I don’t recommend trying to self-host mail server.
You can use Tuta, Proton Mail, Gmail or iCloud Mail services. You just need to add some DNS records to the domain to redirect mail provider.
- Cloudflare + protonmail is my setup. Works great and if you buy like 2 years it's pretty cheap.
  
  Yeah I'm also using Proton but I will switch to Tuta because it has more features I think.

Use Cloudflare or PorkBun.com for cheap, no bullshit domains. As for the email host, self hosting not recommended. It's a long battle to be not blocked by every other provider.
I recommend purelymail.com - no cost to add (even multiple!) custom domains, unlimited users, only pay for mail usage and storage. Go for advanced pricing until it starts costing you more than $10/yr. (Which it shouldn't if it's just you. Seriously this thing is cheap!) I just passed my one year anniversary with PurelyMail, and have spent $6 so far. This is my most expensive month, 85¢. And that's only because I host a public Lemmy instance (small) and we had a few hundred spam signups which sends an email each time.
This will give you a total yearly price WAY under what Google or Microsoft will give you. Google is like, $7.20/user/month.
And if for some reason that service goes down one day, as long as you still have a mail client with your email stored in it you should be able to just switch providers and import your emails from your client. Make some backups.
- For anybody interested in more choices for volume-based providers like PurelyMail (with tiers based on storage and emails sent/received but who otherwise allow unlimited domains/mailboxes/aliases) there's also MXRoute (US) and Migadu (Swiss/EU).
  These providers don't usually make sense for a single mailbox (although some of them have a low entry tier for this purpose) but can be extremely cost-efficient if you need 2 or more mailboxes/domains.
- I was very tempted to go for this one, but couldn't find info on whether this was a one-man operation or if there are any disaster recovery plans. Sounds cruel, but if that one single guy my email depends on gets hit by a bus...
  
  It is. But as said, for personal email what's the huge risk? You find a new provider, transfer your DNS records, and upload your old emails.
  Make some backups of your emails, you should be anyway.
  But they have a specific FAQ for this: https://purelymail.com/docs/companyPolicy#bus

I tried both hosting my own mail server and using a paid mail hosting with my own domain and I advise against the former.
The reason not to roll out your own mail server is that your email might go to spam at many many common mail services. Servers and domains that don't usually send out big amount of email are considered suspicious by spam filters and the process of letting other mail servers know that they are there by sending out emails is called warming them up. It's hard and it takes time... Also, why would you think you can do hosting better than a professional that is paid for that? Let someone else handle that.
With your own domain you are also not bound to one provider - you can change both domain registrar and your email hosting later without changing your email address.
Also, avoid using something too unusual. I went with firstname@lastname.email cause I thought it couldn't be simpler than that. Bad idea... and I can't count how many times people send mail to a wrong address because such tld is unfamiliar. I get told by web forms regularly that my email is not a valid address and even people that got my email written on a piece of paper have replaced the .email with .gmail.com cause "that couldn't be right"...
- I get told by web forms regularly that my email is not a valid address and even people that got my email written on a piece of paper have replaced the .email with .gmail.com cause “that couldn’t be right”…
  That's the thing that holds me back from a non-standard TLD, as much as I'd love to get a vanity domain.
  I've got a .org I've had for over 20 years now. My primary email address has been on that domain for almost as long. While I don't have problems with web-based forms, telling people my email address is a chore at best since it's not gmail, outlook, yahoo, etc...
  
  More and more services are REQUIRING a gmail/outlook/etc. account simply because bots/scammers bombard their services. It's their cheap captcha.
  I'm seeing it more and more and it infuriates me to no end.
- Yeah, I use firstname@thelastnames.co
  And EVERY DAMN PERSON corrects .co to .com
  Unfortunately the .com.and .net are both used.
- You can avoid the warmup by using an SMTP relay, and you can just use the one from your DNS provider if you're not planning to send hundreds of mails per day.

I've done this in the past using Gmail. You pick a domain provider and get their email plan. Most offer both services. I've used name cheap.
Then in your regular Gmail account you can configure the IMAP settings from the domain registrar to receive the email from that inbox. Then in Gmail find the settings where you can send as another address. This lets you use that new address in our outbound mail. From there I just auto label the incoming mail to help sort the two addresses.
Now you should have your regular Gmail and your new novelty email all in one place.
- Wait, does this mean you're giving Gmail the password for the other mailbox?
  
  That's how IMAP works for any mail client

GoDaddy is notorious for terrible service and NameCheap has started doing some shady stuff too lately. Luckily there are other decent registrars out there. I can recommend Netim.com or INWX.de in the EU – they also provide EU-specific TLDs which American registrars don't.
If you need more than one mailbox you can't beat the offers from providers like PurelyMail/MXRoute/Migadu, where you pay for the storage instead of per-mailbox. I'm using Migadu because, again, they work under EU/Swiss privacy laws.
Here are some more providers if you're interested in taking advantage of EU privacy: https://european-alternatives.eu/category/email-providers
You do not need to spin up your own mail service and should not. Email and DNS hosting are the most abuse-prone and easy to mess up services; always go to an established provider for these.
Are there concerns tying my accounts to a service that might go under or are some "too big to fail"?
Look into their history. Generally speaking a provider that's been around for a decade or more probably won't dissapear overnight; they probably have a sustainable income model and have been around the block.
That being said nothing saves even long-established providers from being acquired. This happened for example to a French service (Gandi) with over 20 years of history.
The only answer to that is to pick providers that don't lock you into proprietary technologies and offer standard services like IMAP, and also to keep your domain+DNS and your email providers separate. This way if the email service starts hiking prices or does anything funny you can copy your email, switch your domain(s), and be with another provider the very next day.
- What did namecheap do? I've got a bunch of domains with them. 🤦‍♂️
  
  A general reduction in service quality, increasing domain prices (double check your renewals) and there are reports of domain name sniping (where they grab names that people are looking up).
  
  .com domains recently got more expensive. Almost double in price compared to CloudFlare (who sell domains at cost).
- Gandi's case hurts me. I had been paying for years but they kept raising their prices like dragonball z power levels.

Just throwing in my two cents since I just went through this same ordeal: I use Proton, but be aware that you can only use a custom address if you pay for the premium plan which is not crazy cheap. I've been pretty happy with their premium plan so far, which includes premium features for mail, calendar, cloud drive, VPN, and password manager, but if I ever decide that I don't want to keep paying for it, I can always transfer my custom domain to a different provider without needing to update my email.
As for the domain, I went with namecheap. I also have a pretty common name, so the good domains were taken and I had to settle for firstname@lastname.in but I think it's still pretty easy to remember.
- Proton is all fun and games until you find out they don't support IMAP/SMTP without a bridge.
  
  And that the bridge is only available on PC – on mobile you must use their proprietary app. And they're working on launching a proprietary desktop app, after which they'll have no reason to offer the IMAP bridge anymore.

I'm an admin of a self hosted iRedMail (with iRedAdmin Pro).
My advice is: Don't.
Getting an email server running is easy. Managing them is not.
There are some good advice here. Use commercial service with personal domain.

As someone who is once again trying to setup an email server, it’s more work than it’s worth for like 99% of people
- Give me a ping if you need a hand, I've done it for decades.

I do this. Personally I use cloudflaire for my domain and dns, not that I'm committed to them it's just what I use. I then use protonmail for my email and point the relivent records to them.

Purchase the domain with cloudflare, for email it depends how you use it:
With an email client like thunderbird:
A cheap service like mxroute is perfect
If you need to use a webmail:
You need to pay a lot because the free webmails are all unusable for advanced use.
Good options:
Zoho at $1 per user per month
Exchange with ovh at €3 per user per month
Bad options:
Google workspace at $10 per month per user plus the blood rights for your firstborn and pray that they don't alter the deal
proton pro at $9 per user per month but IMHO is extremely overrated for what they offer at their price point (unless you need end to end encryption when emailing other proton users)
- +1 for own domain and some email hosting service. That also makes it pretty easy to switch providers because you can simply point your MX records etc. somewhere else - no need to change the actual email address.
  I can also recommend mailbox.org as an alternative to mxroute, they're even a little cheaper at $3/month (mxroute is $49/year at minimum).
  
  You may want to check lowendtalk. Jar (mxroute owner) run promo over there, at least once a year.
  His last black friday link below. https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/190301/mxroute-black-friday-2023-email-hosting-that-spammers-crave-but-cant-have/p1
  His black friday page still up too. https://mxroute.blackfriday/
  Cheapest is $15/3 years for 10GB.
  I’ve been using his service for years with no issue, and my account is grandfathered plan ($10/year for 50GB)
  Non affiliate beside being their customers for years.
- Protonmail is a honeypot. Stay away

I don't know current pricing, but a premium proton account, which was ~$9/month when I started has worked very well for me. I like the other features they are rolling out and use them a lot.
Domain is purchased through cloudflare, and I think it was like $10/year?

There is a security risk of using your first name and last name in your email. It's very easy for malicious people to send you emails specifically addressing you. I have realized it now and I take the extra steps to set up good spam blocking in my email.

Lots of people have said worthwhile things. Don't selfhost email for example. While going with an email hoster has been recommended a couple times, which is good and easy, I want to offer an alternative: SimpleLogin (or comparable providers). Essentially a "email alias generator", it forwards received emails to one or more mail addresses (Google, Hotmail, what have you). It also allows you to connect a domain and then create new inboxes on the fly by simply sending (or telling a service to send) an email to that non-existing inbox. Which is incredibly handy if you're faced with a situation that demands an email, where you don't want to give out an actual email.
So say you have the domain doe.com, and you're in a physical shop at the register, faced with the question if you want to get 10% off by registering for their members club. You can simply give the cashier the email "coupon_walmart@doe.com" (which does not yet exist), the email will be sent, received bei SL, the inbox created and the coupon code forwarded to your Gmail account. Afterwards, you can disable or delete the inbox and never have to worry about newsletters or data breaches. Nifty!
Every one of these boxes also has its own "sent from" address visible in your actual mail account. Which means that you can simply respond to incoming emails, and the recipient will see the mail address they sent a message to. This also means that you can set up filters in your mail account to move messages from certain sender addresses into specific labels, as if they were real separate email accounts.
- I find there is less management overhead regarding inboxes with SL, compared to creating, managing and logging into multiple receiving addresses under a real mail server.
  Sure, you can set one mail account on your domain and define it as catch all, but then won't be able to send from these names.
  Or you can create accounts you want, but then cannot quickly create new inboxes without opening your control dashboard.
  Obviously, if you want to register with a service anonymously, you'd use one of the SL domains, which I do plenty too!
  And at the end of the chain, all messages run into the same singular Google inbox, making it easier for me to manage all messages from all domains.
  I'm sure paid email hosters will have their own advantages, but as I said at the beginning of my original comment, I want to show an alternative solution, not a better solution.
- Very interesting. How long have you used this? Has it been reliable the whole time?
  
  Please keep in mind that the alias functionality offered by services like SimpleLogin should be included with any paid email service. So SimpleLogin only makes sense if you're using a free email service (like Gmail) and using the free SL aliases based on their domains; bearing in mind those free tiers will usually be severely limited.
  If you intend to get your own domain you might as well use a real mail provider.
  
  I've been using it for around 1.5 years, and so far I've received every message I've wanted to receive. Though I am always sort of aware that they are yet another party I depend on with my mail delivery, so I don't usually use them for crucial services.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters	More Letters
DNS	Domain Name Service/System
IMAP	Internet Message Access Protocol for email
SMTP	Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
VPN	Virtual Private Network
VPS	Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)

5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 8 acronyms.

[Thread #416 for this sub, first seen 9th Jan 2024, 12:05] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

As far as I know Gmail and others also offer using your own Domain with them. Maybe that's easier for you.

I have been using porkbun.com as a domain registrar.
For email hosting, self-hosting is a lot of effort. If you just want the damned thing to work. I've heard good things about Fastmail, and personally I'm using migadu.com. it's $19/year for micro.
Use any imap client, or if you want to keep using what you're using Gmail and Outlook and Apple mail apps w all support your new personal account over imap as well
- I use Fastmail.
  My domain has me plus the wife, and she’s not willing to tolerate any amount of fiddling or bugs or anything, so we needed something that would Just Work™, and Fastmail fits the bill quite well.
  Their features are great, I actually prefer their app over the native iOS app, and they’ve been rock solid since I signed up. I can also have any amount of aliased and I can put all three of my domains on there. Plus they’re not Google which was the biggest thing I needed them to be.

Cloudflare sells domains at cost. If you use apple devices and pay for iCloud+ ($1.99 a month for the cheapest plan), you can get email hosting for your domain for the entire family + a catch all address.
You can run an email host yourself but it is going to cost more in time and effort to maintain than just paying for hosting. It’s not very professional if your messages go to spam due to low reputation or if you miss a message/someone gets a bounce back because the container running your mail server was down and you didn’t realize
Run mail on a custom domain for fun, to learn what it takes, but don’t do it for mail that really matters

Domain+Zoho Mail Lite subscription (less than 1€/month, ATM).

Self-hosting email is not at all easy, and I'd recommend paying for hosted email from a service that lets you use a custom domain. Most will let you have multiple inboxes, although this may cost extra.
Then, just buy a domain (NameCheap is fine) and point your MX records at the email provider.

I use both. I have a self hosted docker compose instance of mailcow, which alerts me when an update is available.
I also use protonmail as well.
Self hosting was a pain in the ass to get working, but I've had no issues with it once up. I tossed it behind a reverse proxy to keep it from directly touching the internet.

I use Google Domains to create custom email addresses on the fly that syphons to my personal Gmail address.
If I subscribe to a service, say Netflix, I just put netflix@mydomain.com and it automagically exists and redirects to my Gmail.
- You mean Squarespace? https://support.google.com/domains/answer/13689670

If you ever decide to host your own, via VPS or sth consider checking docker-mailserver and watchtower. First takes care of the mail stuff and the second updates your containers frequently so you will not have to manually update to new versions of the container (for security patches etc.).

.

My father still has a gmail account for all of our last names.

Friends don't let friends self host email.
Easy enough to make it work, but maintaining 100% uptime and 100% deliverability is very difficult.

Based on my personal experience, id say gmail, you only need a domain I used namecheap without any issue. You register with that on google, some settings you set on namecheap , it guides you all the way then you pay the lowest monthly fee, I pay 5.20 euros per month for my company's mail.
You set up a main email then you can setup any number of aliases for yourself I think, you can also create group emails and assign yourself to it

Get a domain from Njalla, set it up with Proton Mail. That's the best solution in my opinion. I don't think there's anything better for privacy.
- Njalla had some big controversy regarding their reliability and trustworthiness. I'd stay away from their services.
  
  Source?

EasyDNS.ca or if they also do EasyDNS.com
GoDaddy was a bunch of sleazebags, back in the day...
Go search http://slashdot.org/ for them, and see...
not only hosting lots of sleazebags, but also having tons of compromised mail machines, so their machines were, according to what I'd read there, the source of much of the world's spam, and they wouldn't fix things.
EasyDNS was recommended by one of the SysAdmin reporters on The Register, a few years ago.
He also recommended Linode & Vultr, back then, too.
This stuff in this comment is just my opinion, and my memory of what trustworthy people were reporting a few years ago.
_ /\ _

Self Dost is the perfect solution for you!
- "Self" ... "Dost"?
  Idk, that looks strikingly like a no-brand Freedom box, except there are no specs to judge by. Just some super iffy, nondescript sales pitch. "That's it, yes indeed"!
  
  Thank you! :) I offer it. I assure you it is the best product that is theoretically possible!
  Freedom box has inferior software. It is way heavier compared to our setup.

With an email client like thunderbird:

If you need to use a webmail: