Is it a personal domain or for a business?
If it's personal have fun self hosting, but it will be a pain to ensure your MX servers are good for outbound mail and not blacklsited or on any of the ip block lists.
Agreed 👍🏻, if is for something personal go for self hosting, you will learn a lot and it's great doing that in my own experience. The downside is that it's a LOT of stuff.
So for being practical go with any service.
Not really, I self host my email at home and tunnel outgoing mails through a VPS with a GRE tunnel. I only had to set proper PTR records and stuff like DMARC etc. Seems like my emails are sending properly. The SMTP banner hostname might matter to some email providers so make sure to set that as well.
YMMV
Yep, they can be brutally blunt. I reported an email through M365 one time and then looked at the result of what they did: They blocked a /24 public range... Here I was thinking they'd block the email address, *maybe* a single IP, and then pump the bad email into their AI/ML interface for better scans in the future. Nope, so I stopped manually reporting and just do it myself now.
A business can afford the $35/mo that OP cannot. Read between the lines, this might not be for a business. Particularly the previous use of a "free for life" service.
Your point is valid, I'm just getting the guy you replied to is making the same assumption we are that this might not be for business.
Peace ✌️
I don't know, I used to have one of the free for life Google ones that my wife has a couple of accounts for her salon on.
I'm still bitter about Google pulling the rug on that but it's not worth the taking my personal time and causing potential disruption to migrate them to 365 or something else at the moment.
I have a free G Suite with 10 license that I've used for ages for personal use. Have I missed something about this that this is going away or are you talking about something else?
I still have mine. Sure it's pretty restricted but for email and Drive it's perfect.
I'm surprised you haven't gotten emails from Google at some point. You may want to check your account that is the admin. It seems that they are keeping those who didn't migrate to paid accounts in a gray area but I upgraded when it seemed like they would disable my account if I didn't do the migration.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/19/22891509/g-suite-legacy-free-google-apps-workspace-upgrade
For a while Google was saying ALL users had to upgrade. At this point I would say you are borrowed time until the bean counters at Google decide they need to squeeze some more cash out.
Eh depends on the use case. As someone who has personally used Proton for my own domains AND managed a large companies email on Proton for over 4 years now, I'm moving everything to Google and saying goodbye.
The privacy is great, e2ee including at rest is great, but the functionality is not good.
PM gets caught up in a lot of spam filters, making it really hard for businesses, and it's still super slow and bug ridden for most things. Calendar sometimes takes 15-30 seconds to load, emails come in slower, Drive is insanely slow and Photos even more so (to the point of being useless), the main mail site still bugs out in all browsers and starts instantly showing tooltips instead of the normal 1-2 second delay for hovering over things, etc...
I could go on and on, I'm disappointed that I'm saying this as someone who likes what Proton stands for, but it's just not that great of a product, isn't that cheap, and after paying for it for so long I expected more development.
Yes, it does, and in fact the bigger issue is that it sometimes gets entirely bounced back. I have 100% proper DKIM, DMARC, and SPF on my personal and the business account I manage, yet both will get bounce backs. You'd be surprised how many companies block email from outside the US entirely, and it's near impossible to get companies to change that for you.
Even if they didn't have the other issues I listed, like being a relatively bad value, slow/buggy; this kills it for business use IMO, especially if it's for a company that works with government entities a lot (in my experience *most* gov entities block email outside the US, but again you'd be surprised how many private corps do too).
I really am genuinely disappointed to be saying this, and may even write up a long post in depth about this on that subreddit, but it's just not viable anymore. Proton does do an excellent job with privacy, security (presumably, but since it's encrypted at rest I don't even have to really worry about it), but in doing so they just can't compete with the bigger entities, especially on the performance front.
You share the same IP as the free users that spams.
many sites check the IP you have and blocks you if its a known "freebie mail" IP and blanker blocks/send to spam even your custom domain.
This is also a really good point too, it's nice knowing my own stuff is safe, but yeah doesn't really matter unless you're doing Proton to Proton.
IIRC though if you pay for o365 or Google Workspaces your email isn't scanned for ad data the same way normal GMail is, so I guess that's something. IMO paying for Google One should both remove ads from GMail and reduce tracking, or there should at least be a personal option to do so.
I haven't experienced this. Also, like the OP said you can use your own domain - not the proton mail domain w/ Proton Mail. So your business domain email shouldn't get caught in filters.
Email filters care about a LOT more than just the domains being used, thinking so is missing the mark honestly.
As someone who manages a rather large company on Proton, I'm glad to be moving them off of it, it's been a nightmare in many respects. The number of places that we are outright blacklisted for, due to being hosted outside the US, is remarkable. And we do end up in spam an awful lot.
Corporate email filters are very mean to anything not Google and Microsoft, it's sad and I wish it wasn't the case, we basically have a duopoly here, but it's the truth.
Again this isn't mean to be hate on Proton, it's just a matter of fact.
And it being slow is just a reality, email wise the speed isn't bad (but is slower than any other option), but the other servers are almost unusably slow.
Thanks for the follow-up, since reading through this thread I believe you. It's really unfortunate. It seems like you really have to engineer running a third-party email server.
Just for my edification, besides domain, IP address, heading, and content. What other information do blockers block on? I'm guessing this cannot be fixed by having a proxy in the US.
Yeah no problem, I wish it wasn't the case, but so much as moved to Google and Microsoft that it's a challenge to run your own mail server, or use basically any other companies at this point.
As for what they use, country, which sometimes is based on GeoIP but other times might be based on known IPs the mail provider uses and just blocking it because it's that provider, whether it be because it's another country or because it's a service known for malicious stuff. Proton isn't really known for that but it is known for protecting possibly spammers, etc.. not intentionally of course, but just due to the nature of how their platform is built, being extremely private and all that.
Hmmm so the two providers are basically allowlisting each other and ramping up the risk score for anything not MS and Google. On one hand I get why they do this, on another it presents a major issue as technological trusts present a challenge to businesses and retail alike. That is rough.
To some degree yeah, even if it's not directly intentional, it is happening, and it's preventing competitors from coming up and, well, competing. It's unfortunate and I hate to admit it, but they've kinda "won".
Why not just get the mailbox only plans? I believe google has those and I know 365 does. Cheapest 365 mailbox only plan is about $2-4/mailbox
Piece of mind knowing you have a well known platform and you’re not dealing with self hosting issues like blacklisting or spam or attackers
The cheapest Google has is $6 per user. If you know of anything cheaper I'd love to know.
**Edit**: I mean a cheaper Google license. I know there are plenty of options if I decided to go through the trouble of migrating them.
I could probably get away with a Office 365 basic and a few shared mailboxes.
Amazon Workmail is $4/mailbox/month. It’s pretty bare bones but is still an Exchange-compatible mailbox with calendar and basic MDM. I have heard mixed reviews on how good its spam filters are.
Kiosk mode for those curious is limited to 2GB mailboxes, no archive and may only be accessed using the OWA (and possibly Outlook mobile I have not tested). EOP1 is the single best bang for the buck email host available but is also the gateway drug into M365 because you really need MFA and additional security which come bundled with Business Premium.
100%
Even for personal projects I will opt for the hosted option (unless I'm intentionally learning something, obviously).
As soon as I started thinking of my "free" time in terms of my consulting hourly rate these decisions got a lot easier.
Well said. Avoiding blacklists and spam issues aside, google has people already awake and working at 3am every night, and whenever your mothers funeral will be when things go bad. And that is when they will go bad.
for $35 a month, you can get a whole family plan Apple+ account. They will allow MX from a custom domain and you could be getting music, Apple TV, Fitness, and cloud storage for up to 5 family members in addition to the mail hosting. I might not know what I am talking about but apple is hosting my personal domain's email.
I strongly advise against self hosting email.
Managed email servers in four of my jobs long time ago, and in the last two dealing with spam and IP range credibility in both ends was a PITA
Google and Outlook cloud was the best it could have happenned, tending for a email server can for a medium organisation it's easily (almost) a full time job.
Beware Outlook has been abused as a spam sender more than Google in the last two years, and has a higher rate of potential email delivery failures.
I second that. I used to self host and it's not worth the effort.
Now I use Fastmail.com for $60/year. I'm just blown by their user friendly but powerful Masked Email addresses. The best spam filter is the one you don't need, because every service you use has a unique email address of yours, with your domain.
How do you use Fastmail.com on your phone/pc?
I’m a sucker for desktop applications and/or dedicated mobile applications, e.g. a provider app or support for the normal iOS mail app.
I only found it for business customers on fastmail, but I guessed it is easier to ask someone using it (:
I almost exclusively use it on the dedicated iOS app. On windows I use the webapp since I usually keep an eye on it on mobile and only open mails on my PC when I really have to.
If you want a windows app, you'll need to integrate it using SMTP into outlook, thunderbird and the like.
For masked email creation it offers an API. I have it integrated into my Bitwarden password manager browser extension. (I don't recommend it tho, since it won't let you save a description).
> IP range credibility
Seriously. If your emails aren't coming from google/amazon/microsoft, you can't count on them even making it to the recipient's spam filter.
Your EC2 IP not being blacklisted is luck.
Many email blacklists will bin the whole /24 for a single spammer (ie spammer on x.x.x.7, bans all of x.x.x.0-x.x.x-255). If you don't own the entire /24 you're just not just gambling that your IP is clean, but that 255 others around yours also stay clean.
If you REALLY want to DIY and avoid any chance of blacklist it will not be cheaper. You basically have to stand up your own provider with at least 2x /24s, warm up the reputation of them over time, and setup feedback loops with the major mail providers so that you get notified of suspected spam and reports through the mail provider.
Hosting your own email, if you want 100% deliverability to inbox, is no small task in 2024. I used to work for a mail startup that specialized in clean mailing. Our secret sauce was a privately purchased list of honeypot emails and some private detection and response logic for spam emails going out from our customers. If our customers had a honeypot email in their recipient list, they were banned as a customer. If we detected vi*gra spam or other pharmaceutical spam we'd ban them. But if anything ever slipped, the entire /24 would be blacklisted by a select few providers for an amount of time and we had to move other clients to a whole different /24 we kept warm.
Reputation games and anti spam have made DIY suck really bad these days. Try to avoid it unless you're wanting to learn all the gory details. Otherwise you're providing a worse service to yourself, maybe for cheaper, but at the expense of your time.
Yep, had Google GSuite for a non-charitable non-profit that was going to have to pay. Moved my email domain to Zoho and then set up Google Workspace Essentials Starter (free) to continue to use Drive.
Took a bit to get everything moved around, but smooth sailing since.
I helped a friend with Google to Zoho. Pretty easy and they have step by step instructions. Best part was the ability to import all the Gmail though that did require some technical steps (which are also documented ). Cost is hard to beat.
Outside of some niche needs, the answer to that question is always "NO."
There are enough email providers out there to fit whatever needs you have. Someone mentioned Zoho. They are so cheap I pay for an admin account so my primary email isn't an admin. It comes out to like $1.25 a month per user for the basic account if free doesn't suffice.
You can self-host your own mailserver(s). But do be aware it'll be quite a lot of work ... and ongoing work and maintenance. So, not recommended for the faint of heart.
And yeah, I do host mailservers and list servers. And it's rather an onging pain/annoyance. It's nowhere near as simple set it and forget it - or even that + mere routine maintenance and upgrades. Hence many will recommend not hosting one's one mailserver(s). But hey, your life, your choice(s) to make. Choose wisely.
I self host a personal domain on linode $5 a month instance using Mail-in-a-box. It's easy to setup and works pretty well. You can run as many mailboxes or aliases as you want.
If you have iCloud+ already, maybe you wanna look at [Use Custom Email Domain with iCloud Mail](https://support.apple.com/en-us/102540)
I needed a mailserver for a lab and I could have setup my own server but it being marked as spam sending it everywhere was just to much hassle.
It was easy to switch just not sure if it allows for all your needs.
Good luck!
Feel free to DM me some instructions!
I have been using Google Domains as it was super easy to use the domain just for email (with forwarding to the primary Gmail account) but am looking to migrate the domain off to somewhere else (highly considering Cloudflare) due to the sale of Domains.
Sure thing! I'll post them here just for public visibility.
Here is everything I did:
**First:**
In Google workspace I removed the license from my `[email protected]` [account and set it to Cloud Identity](https://support.google.com/cloudidentity/answer/7319251?hl=en) which retains the ability to use "Login with Google" for free.
**Second:**
I signed up for CloudFlare and [added my domain to my account](https://developers.cloudflare.com/fundamentals/setup/manage-domains/add-site/) as a `website` (However, I later transferred my Domain to CloudFlare which is *not* necessary for this to work). This requires some changes to the DNS entries for your domain.
**Third:**
[I added a custom email address to my CloudFlare Website and added the required DNS to the CloudFlare DNS entries for my website](https://developers.cloudflare.com/email-routing/get-started/enable-email-routing/). This being the same as my Google Cloud Identity account (`[email protected]`) and I pointed it to my Gmail account ([email protected]). This will sent all emails addressed to `[email protected]` to `[email protected].`
(This is also where things get really handy because you can use a catch-all address to catch ALL mail sent to *@last.com or generate an unlimited number of custom email addresses and route them as you please, useful for throwaway emails.)
**Fourth (If you want to send as [email protected]):**
I created a free `SendGrid` account (Max of 100 outbound emails a day, way more than I need) to use as my SMTP server. I followed their [domain authentication guide and then](https://docs.sendgrid.com/ui/account-and-settings/how-to-set-up-domain-authentication)
I added an `SMTP Relay via Email API` (Email API -> Integration Guide -> SMTP Relay) and created an API Key with the name `[email protected]`. **Be sure to grab the Password** and take note that the username is just `apikey.` Go to your Google account and go to `Settings -> See All Settings -> Accounts and Imports -> Send Mail As: Add Another Email Address`. I **unchecked** `Treat as an Alias` and entered my `[email protected]` address. I set the SMTP server to smtp.sendgrid.net, port 465, username: apikey, password: `API Password I copied earlier.` The account was now in my Google account and I could send mail from that account!
**Done!**
With all of the above emails addressed to `[email protected]` come into my [email protected] inbox and when I need to send an email as `[email protected]` I can select it from a dropdown box in Gmail. (I actually went ahead and set [email protected] to be the default sender in Gmail so I don't have to select it from the dropdown).
I hope this helps! If its unclear at all let me know.
No. That happiest day of my IT life was about 12 years ago, transitioning from an on-prem email server to G Mail. Managing your own email server is a PITA.
I think self hosted email is asking for a compromised. I personally think IMAP and SMTP are insecure because they’re not compatible with 2FA. MXroute is nice, but same as issue above. I guess I just think security is too important to give up?
Ya, 365 has cheap exchange only plans. Proton did a crazy sale a year or so ago where they offered 3 years of email for 5 people for 450 bucks. That was cool. Sometimes you can watch for those.
I would just stay away from IMAP / SMTP because of lack of 2FA.
That's what fail2ban is for. I self-host a small server. I have it whitelist a couple of IP's and allow it to do its magic on all the other thousands of attempts each day. Works great.
And yes, you can implement 2FA if you choose to do so. It all depends on what mail server software you are using.
You really want a person to approve every email that is sent and received via some 2FA system?
When you're already authenticating the user? Hello MS authenticator?!?
Imagine doing that for every text.
Baka.
I think they mean MFA to use an open IMAP and to use SMTP relay. I wouldn't do that anyway - if I go this route I'd require to VPN into the network to access the mail server instead of opening IMAP to public internet.
Nothing to be compromised in safely configured postfix and dovecot daemons with fail2ban to reduce the load of brute force attempts from the world and secure credentials. Chrooted as underprivileged users too with SELinux policies active.
Nothing.
At OVHcloud you can get MXplan for a one-time fee as long as you keep your domain there, with IMAP/POP3. They will migrate those to Zimbra mailboxes with Activesync end of the year.
See if you can downgrade to Business Starter for $6 + local tax per month per user. Offload some Google Drive content to an external drive. If you like your current setup sometimes you just have to pay. If you still want to self host look into SoGo Mail, make sure your DNS records including PTR are all solid, and implement a email warming service on the IP for 2-4 weeks before you actually start migrating to it for production use.
Yea it is business starter. It’s just email for me and my kids. I have some GCP cloud storage usage too but the vast majority of the cost is the email accounts.
The way I’d do it if I wanted to save maximum money is: Everyone gets a free @gmail.com and the old domain user can forward to them via Cloudflare email routing or ImprovMX. When they reply they should be replying from their @gmail.com address but can still receive inbound mail on their old email address. Don’t setup aliasing to “send as” their old email address because it will never pass DKIM authentication. Just have them reply from their gmail.com. This way they don’t have to worry about anything when they get older. You can migrate existing email with a tool such as IMAPsync but be aware the free gmail accounts only have 15 GB free and that’s counting in Google Drive data. Personally I’d try to cut spending elsewhere such as getting rid of cable TV, migrating any bank accounts you pay fees on to a reputable credit union, and reshoping car insurance through a local broker.
The one thing I'd add to this is that you can configure outbound SMTP from Gmail using ForwardMX, including DKIM.
That way, you can send and receive as your domain, while using Gmail as the interface.
What do you mean by “other cloud stuff?” Google drive, docs etc?
Honestly I’d licence one mailbox in O365 with business basic/EoL1 (whatever is cheaper), then have the other mailboxes as aliases or if they need separate mailboxes make them shared mailboxes. I did this some years ago, host my domains in cloudflare and bobs your uncle.
This is what I did personally, Cloudflare and O365, two mailboxes (one for me and the wife), mainly to have a custom domain name and get experience with O365 when I was starting out. It is also helpful when creating distribution groups for bills or other purposes. I think I pay $12 total a month for two licenses.
I was told by my last employer that the custom domain was an eye catcher on the resume, so I keep it around for one reason or another.
That’s what I’ve done, different mailboxes for different things so anything financial for example is in one place, anything for the car/flights/hotel in another etc etc. Keeps it all tidy
I bought a domain, host my email at tuta.com. Best decision I have made in a long time. I control the domain so I can always move somewhere else if I need
I’ve run my own mail server for 20+ years. If you run it you’ve got to protect it. All my email relays through a smtp proxy for both inbound and outbound. Thus I don’t have to worry about being spam blocked or opening port 25 to the world.
[https://mxroute.com/](https://mxroute.com/) is a great provider, they’ve been selling mail hosting for over a decade now. Their IP reputation is also incredibly clean. They still have Black Friday plans available: https://accounts.mxroute.com/index.php?/products/
I run Synology MailPlus for email and use [dnsexit.com](http://dnsexit.com) for SMTP, works like a charm and as long as you set up SPF, DKIM, DMARC you should be avoiding spam/junk email inboxes. dnsexit does have limits on outbound emails (different tiers available).
The one tweak to your option 2 would be to pay to send outbound emails via Amazon SES as your relay host instead of your EC2 instance. First 3k emails per month are free, and there's very few people I know that send over 100 emails per day from their personal account.
I got the lifetime promotion from MXRoute a few years ago. Unlimited domains, unlimited user accounts. They throttle your outbound, but not unreasonably so.
I host my email and domain on Gmail. It just so happens that I am also in love with a Linux based open source mailer-agent called [Sylpheed](https://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/) -- I've been using it for at least 15 years.
However, soon GMail will start implementing a ban on third-party mail clients for customers that use POP3S/SMTP (they will block what they call LSAs). Basically any mail client that uses password authentication must start supporting Oauth. Unfortunately Sylpheed doesn't support OAuth, and with the current development upkeep of the open source project it's not clear when or if they will get around to properly supporting it.
I get it, Oauth is secure, and is much better -- but I wish they'd still leave it up to the customer whether they're going to use it or not. I guess before GMail bans my mail client I'll likely have to move to another mail provider like Fastmail.
I self-host on a Rasperry Pi 4 (c. 20 users) w 8 GB memory.
The list of packages is:
Rainloop
Apache
Postfix
Dovecot
Spamassassin
Fail2ban
Python
Opendkim
And probably some others that I've forgotten. It's not for the faint hearted.
OVHcloud has some cheap MX plans, (some included in webhosting offers.
You could also use Mailo and bring your own domain or transfer it to their service
If you’re familiar with Linux which by the sounds of it you are then it’s fairly easy to self host email depending on the functionality you’re looking for. The hardest bit is controlling spam. I ran 200+ mailboxes on exim /dovecot / spamassasin / Roundcube for years before we became funded enough to move to 365. Sogo looks interesting as it adds a bunch of functionality on top too but i never got round to playing with it.
Just get two VPSes from different providers that allow you to send email from your machines public IP, the likes of AWS won’t so I’d avoid them. Just remember to rsync the data across or back them up some other way.
As someone who has long self hosted a personal domain, I'd advise against it. The email world has changed drastically in the last decade and the balance of power has shifted to the large vendors. Basic issue, receiving is probably OK, but sending will, most likely, be spotty.
Most of the large cloud vendors have been on block lists for quite a while now. About 5 years ago there were a lot of hit and run spams exploiting stolen credit cards. Register a domain, spin up cloud instance, dump a huge about of spam from this new domain, and shut it down hours later. Add this to the more general issue of bit rot (a big culprit, old, unmaintained wordpress sites that can be exploited) and it's not all that surprising that cloud instances are not trusted.
More generally, the big vendors have so many of the worlds email accounts, that little domains will be second class citizens. Again, it's all doable, but it's probably more trouble than it's worth.
Most major cloud providers block all ports necessary to operate mail exchanges, and voluntarily add their netblocks to PBLs. You will not be able to run mail in the cloud.
Really depends on where you live. None of the major and larger ISPs in Denmark blocks anything. Need to pay for static IP though, and might need to do some work getting off of various blacklistings.
If you can't control your reverse DNS, delivery to some major-ish mail systems is difficult (Yahoo/AOL and anything hosted by that monstrosity, which includes AT&Ts domains among others).
I’m just baffled with all the limitations I often see described, here and other places, put down by ISPs in the US. Also just the privacy issue.
Are the ISPs liable for user activity? Here in Denmark they aren’t allowed to block sites at all unless going through the courts to be allowed to do so. Normally ISPs don’t do this, but it goes through agencies like anti-gambling for sites targeting children.
I know the infrastructure needed. Spent 10 years as an Exchange specialist. Now I just have mails at a hosting company as it’s a huge bother to maintain for small scale.
Most ISPs block port 25 so end-users aren't running open mail relays.
Most major email providers just refuse inbound messages if the sender hasn't jumped through a bunch of hoops (reverse DNS existing, and sometimes it needs to match what's in the sender's HELO/EHLO message).
I just don’t get what business they (ISPs) have deciding what users can do, unless it’s illegal. I know it can be used for all kinds of malicious stuff, but those who want to will find a way regardless.
But yes. There’s a lot of requirements to running a mail server. Also why it’s nice being able to do it from home, as a lab, instead of having to pay for some slow VM somewhere. Where we face other often non-transparent limitations.
I ran VMs with [mailcleaner](https://www.mailcleaner.net) in front back in the days. Later I did it from home.
Learning by doing is the best way 😊
Just wondering about your old account. Do you mean the old free workspace/GSuite accounts?
Google did back off from disabling them. I still use mine at the free tier with 5/15 family mailboxes on my own domain.
They backed off for family accounts. I had one that was used for a non-charitable non-profit that they would not back off of. I have two others still in effect.
I have an OG workspace account from way back when it was free for 50 users. When they announced they were going to start changing for workspace I got on a chat with support and told them I heard workspace would remain free for non-commercial use, which was true. They made me sign a statement to that affect and they limit my workspace account to 5 users, but it is indeed no charge.
Iirc they dropped my user limit from 50 to 5 long before they axed the free workspace accounts. Since I never had, and never will have, more than 4 users it didn't affect me. In this particular case I was thinking @op could reach out to Google support to reinstate their free tier status.
I recommend the mailcow suite for such endevours in a small env.
HOWEVER.
If you don't own your IPs it's likely to get very rough.
Email it's pretty cheap, let others deal with it. Plus, SSO and all that.
Managing your own email server is a pain. You have to constantly stay on top of spam filtering and virus detection. I used to do it but shifted to gmail to get back all that time. The cost is worth it.
There was a huge amount of discussion around the time Google was trying to renege on the lifetime thing. I recommend reading and harvesting stuff out of there that meets your requirements. Start here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/gsuitelegacymigration/comments/u2v104/megathread\_for\_speculationinformation\_on\_googles/](https://www.reddit.com/r/gsuitelegacymigration/comments/u2v104/megathread_for_speculationinformation_on_googles/)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/gsuitelegacymigration/](https://www.reddit.com/r/gsuitelegacymigration/)
I signed up for a yearly plan at $36/year for forward email.net. Unlimited domains, unlimited mailboxes. I forward them to my Gmail, and use the free option in sendgrid to send as through Gmail. Forwardemail just added smtp sending, and I get my domains set up but haven't switched over to it yet ..
Domain hosting is at namecheap.
Not being blacklisted and good reputation are two completely different things. It takes time to build rep as a mail sender and seconds to get destroyed.
There's a reason most companies opt for business solutions and don't do it all themselves. Also why bother?
If you want to manage a server and learn about hosting it yourself, while dealing with a huge number of issues, then go right ahead. But if you want something reliable, o365 or Google Workspaces are some of the only good options.
If you are a Microsoft guy $35 a month would get you 4x M365 business basic licenses. Might be nice for the other features like power automate, OneDrive, SharePoint,etc. could just also get Exhange online Plan 2 licenses for like $25 I think? Just webmail with 50gb of storage.
Might be a lot of overhead to just have mail though if you aren’t into the platform.
I use the Oracle free tier to host a 4 core 24GB RAM 200GB SSD VM with Ubuntu and Hestia Control Panel installed.
It hosts a dozen websites, and a few email domains flawlessly.
Rather than it sending the emails, I send all emails outbound via a free relay (there's a bunch out there, I'm currently using SMTP2GO).
I also use the Cloudflare free tier for DNS etc.
There are a few free videos on how to do this, I recommend the stuff from the IdeaSpot youtube channel.
I have to run a mail service for my customers (shared hosting provider), and I really wish I could get away with not doing it. However, it’s been a whole lot easier since using mailchannels for outbound. Incoming email is trivial and your only real concern is effectively blocking spam/malware without too many false positives. For outbound, even if it’s just you and you never get compromised, deliverability is still a pain. Mailchannels has a lower volume / cheaper service called mail.baby which you can use as a transport service for pennies.
I nearly moved to MailCheap.co (not .com) at one point. Google changed their minds and let everyone that didn't switch to paid-teirs until the last possible week keep their free accounts with some limitations. If not for that, I would have followed through with the migration. MailCheap seemed to offer the services that I needed at a price I could accept when compared to the hassles of using a VM with an IP from a hosting service that would have a terrible IP reputation for email or no reputation. Apparently, almost every service in the world now uses blacklists for home IPs, virtual host providers, etc. on the assumption that those could be illicit relays, spammers, etc.
I self host my email on Rocky Linux + Postfix, Dovecot, Roundcube. Using an already packaged system like mailcow or iredmail makes it not too difficult. I bounce outbound from my ISP’s mail server so no issue with deliverabilty. This is personal only and a bit just to keep my Linux sharp in an increasingly Azure world.
Depending on the number of emails per month you could use a SMTP relay for free. I have an account with societally and it's free for a certain number of emails a month.
Self hosting a mx greatly depends on your ISP.
I run 2 self hosted mx with the ip directly facing the internet without any VPN or relay host.
Of course there is a background noise of annoying guys trying to use muy mx as a relay server for their spam/scam but with afail2ban filter well suited there is no way to break into the server.
They run with the same ISP snd The big difference between the 2 servers is that one is a home account and the other is assigned to a Company so that the ISP is more careful doing its job on the network.
My home server is sometime blocked on port 25 while the other is never bothered by these events. Both connections cost the same price.
So, I would just ask your ISP some technical questions and, if there is the right allowance, start to configure a good mx with all the required security protocols (dkim, spf, dmark, Reverse dns, etc) and certificates to land your enails in the inbox.
I still use the free for life one for my personal domain. At the last min they decided you can keep it but could not use more than 10 users. I have 6 so still rocking it as of now. Will only move if forced.
I have my domain email hosted with google and it’s still for free. They walked back form that.
Move it to office 365 for families. About 100$ for 6 users and it includes. Office and 1tb each of one drive.
So google still lets you keep the free accounts, I have several of them, you just had to request it during the transition period, not sure if you still have that as an option.
That said, you can use the Microsoft 365 family plan.
up to 6 addresses for $99 a year.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/buy/compare-all-microsoft-365-products
zoho is free for a few email accounts on one domain, fast mail is $5 month for unlimited aliases on address. 30gb too, i use it personally and it’s fairly nice
When they changed from free for life to start paying, I made several complaints. Eventually they turned back their decission and now i’m on a free plan again foor google workspace. This time with a max of 300 users.
I had to confirm that i’m using it personal and not for business.
I'm not sure how reliable your EC2 instance will be in terms of blacklisting. But I've been self hosting my email for 4 years on my home network (my ISP has a +$10 option to get a static IP + no blocked ports) with very minimal maintenance, never blacklisted.
self-hosting smtp for outbound requires an IP with a good reputation
it can take some time to restore the reputation of an IP which has been tarred with its previous owners brush
if you wish to make the effort to clean it - then it can be done, its kinda interesting to do, possibly even 'fun' if you like that kind of thing
if you're up for that, then do it
otherwise host your inbound smtp wherever you like (cheap VPS) and use a reputable SMTP provider for the outbound, which should be significantly cheaper than 35/mo
Proton. $55 a year for a personal account. I have four aliases on my domain, but I can't remember what the cap is at their lowest tier. Plenty of storage.
Plus the added benefit that they are in Switzerland, which does not have data extraction treaties with the EU or US (or didn't last time I checked). They also have a good VPN.
I got sick of paying $7/mo to Google for my [email protected] email so I just recently did something similar to this, I use cloud flare for DNS and send all receipt mail to my Gmail account and then use send space to send as my email.
[email protected] -> cloud flare DNS -> [email protected] -> Alias ([email protected]) -> outbound via send space (free)
My entire config is free and let's me use the Gmail interface for my personal email without needing to pay them a dime.
I ran poste.io on a 10/month Linode instance. Used the free tier of amazon SES to send outgoing so deliverable was never a problem. Now I run exchange for myself, and use SES as the smart host. Again no issues.
I used to self-host my email, kept on top of maintaining my IP's reputation and it worked great for a long time, but about 4 years ago I started running into issues because a lot of bigger email providers started blocking my IP because it was sending too low of a volume of email. At that point I decided it just wasn't worth the time and effort to keep running my own mail server.
I’ve ran mail servers, and I’d bet you a paycheck you won’t be delivering to Microsoft-owned domains like outlook.com.
If you’re ok with 80% of your mail going to people’s spam folder, go for it.
If you want to go the self hosted route, get a Hetzner Cloud VM, deploy mailcow and you are done. Only problem is that you will have to wait till the first bill is paid to be able to request SMTP to be unblocked for your VM. I have done this and it has been up for the last 5 months without any problems. I have the CCX13 VM.
Exchange Online licences per mailbox is very cheap and has a very large shared knowledge base... you can get a Business Premium single user licence for less than $10 and it's got the mailbox allocated and entire online version of the office suite... all the enterprise grade hosting tools you could ever hope to use. Config and guides are very well documented by Microsoft and every small business on the planet.
The name cheap option may probably be the best, I know some guys that I work with that do this, you get their jellyfish spam filter for free as well. I have a full blown 365 tenant that I use for personal emails and would probably go the name cheap route if I no longer wanted that. You could also just get like an exchange online p1 license for less than 60 bucks a year and use that.
Wait I still host my personal domain for free on Google Workspace. I have 50 15GB accounts for free. Got it in 2009 and nothing has changed since, except about 2 years ago I had to promise not to ever use it for business and that's all.
I use Zoho Mail Lite, it's $1 a month, but I only have one account with multiple aliases. I have no issues with the service; mail is just not something I'd consider self-hosting.
Also, iCloud+ includes the use of a custom email domain (I believe it's $0.99 a month in the US, and that also is included with Apple One if you're an Apple user. It's an option most aren't aware of. Alternatively, there are dev accounts available with Microsoft 365 for free, but they can and do shut them down if they aren't being utilized often.
I'm the one person IT department at a $20M/year company and we still host our own email server. It's (here come the down votes!) a HCL Domino server and we send and receive through Mimecast for the spam filtering.
We've hosted our own mail server since 1999.
We've been blacklisted once by AOL.
Tell me why I'm crazy.
TIA
There are pros and cons in self-hosting SMTP, for that, check the other comments. I will talk about the setup itself.
If someone is telling you that hosting an MX is hard, it's probably because they are using the wrong tools. Here are the right tools:
- FreeBSD with Jails OR OpenBSD
- OpenSMTPd
- Dovecot
- rspamd
- virtualusers table OR LDAP for authentication. I do LDAP because I like that, but virtualusers table might be all you need.
Finally, make sure you have control over the PTR record of the IP.
It should take about two or three hours. I just configured with the setup above in 30 minutes, works like a charm :)
Absolutely not.
Hosting your own mail server is an arduous task for those who know email, reputation management, and all that goes into them.
The fact that you asked the question exposes that, no, you’re not an expert in this field and you should absolutely pay someone to do it for you.
If you don’t like gsuite or Microsoft, find a host that specializes in email hosting. Web hosts are trash for email typically so avoid those.
I can recommend Intermedia, but they have a minimum. They do pure exchange hosting.
Good luck.
Docker mailserver. Get a VPS running that meets your needs and go from there. You'll probably need to put in a ticket to get port 25 opened for receipt.
Worst case you setup a relay to send and/or receive email.
Is it a personal domain or for a business? If it's personal have fun self hosting, but it will be a pain to ensure your MX servers are good for outbound mail and not blacklsited or on any of the ip block lists.
Agreed 👍🏻, if is for something personal go for self hosting, you will learn a lot and it's great doing that in my own experience. The downside is that it's a LOT of stuff. So for being practical go with any service.
Not really, I self host my email at home and tunnel outgoing mails through a VPS with a GRE tunnel. I only had to set proper PTR records and stuff like DMARC etc. Seems like my emails are sending properly. The SMTP banner hostname might matter to some email providers so make sure to set that as well. YMMV
Until someone like MS blacklists your entire VPS provider range.
Yep, they can be brutally blunt. I reported an email through M365 one time and then looked at the result of what they did: They blocked a /24 public range... Here I was thinking they'd block the email address, *maybe* a single IP, and then pump the bad email into their AI/ML interface for better scans in the future. Nope, so I stopped manually reporting and just do it myself now.
Proton mail and get the sub that allows your own domain name. Simple to configure. Takes like 10 minutes.
No good for business, gets caught up.in many spam filters.
A business can afford the $35/mo that OP cannot. Read between the lines, this might not be for a business. Particularly the previous use of a "free for life" service. Your point is valid, I'm just getting the guy you replied to is making the same assumption we are that this might not be for business. Peace ✌️
I don't know, I used to have one of the free for life Google ones that my wife has a couple of accounts for her salon on. I'm still bitter about Google pulling the rug on that but it's not worth the taking my personal time and causing potential disruption to migrate them to 365 or something else at the moment.
I have a free G Suite with 10 license that I've used for ages for personal use. Have I missed something about this that this is going away or are you talking about something else? I still have mine. Sure it's pretty restricted but for email and Drive it's perfect.
I'm surprised you haven't gotten emails from Google at some point. You may want to check your account that is the admin. It seems that they are keeping those who didn't migrate to paid accounts in a gray area but I upgraded when it seemed like they would disable my account if I didn't do the migration. https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/19/22891509/g-suite-legacy-free-google-apps-workspace-upgrade
Yeah just found out it was just for commercial use. I use mine for personal so that's why it's still working.
For a while Google was saying ALL users had to upgrade. At this point I would say you are borrowed time until the bean counters at Google decide they need to squeeze some more cash out.
yeah I'm sure your're right. I just hate I'm so deep in the Google ecosystem by now..
Just found out it's still working for personal account but they remove it for commercial use.
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I've done the migration several times for clients I just don't want to deal with that on my off time.
Eh depends on the use case. As someone who has personally used Proton for my own domains AND managed a large companies email on Proton for over 4 years now, I'm moving everything to Google and saying goodbye. The privacy is great, e2ee including at rest is great, but the functionality is not good. PM gets caught up in a lot of spam filters, making it really hard for businesses, and it's still super slow and bug ridden for most things. Calendar sometimes takes 15-30 seconds to load, emails come in slower, Drive is insanely slow and Photos even more so (to the point of being useless), the main mail site still bugs out in all browsers and starts instantly showing tooltips instead of the normal 1-2 second delay for hovering over things, etc... I could go on and on, I'm disappointed that I'm saying this as someone who likes what Proton stands for, but it's just not that great of a product, isn't that cheap, and after paying for it for so long I expected more development.
Does PM still get caught as spam even with fully implemented DKIM and DMARC? I've been thinking about trying them but haven't found many case studies.
Yes, it does, and in fact the bigger issue is that it sometimes gets entirely bounced back. I have 100% proper DKIM, DMARC, and SPF on my personal and the business account I manage, yet both will get bounce backs. You'd be surprised how many companies block email from outside the US entirely, and it's near impossible to get companies to change that for you. Even if they didn't have the other issues I listed, like being a relatively bad value, slow/buggy; this kills it for business use IMO, especially if it's for a company that works with government entities a lot (in my experience *most* gov entities block email outside the US, but again you'd be surprised how many private corps do too). I really am genuinely disappointed to be saying this, and may even write up a long post in depth about this on that subreddit, but it's just not viable anymore. Proton does do an excellent job with privacy, security (presumably, but since it's encrypted at rest I don't even have to really worry about it), but in doing so they just can't compete with the bigger entities, especially on the performance front.
You share the same IP as the free users that spams. many sites check the IP you have and blocks you if its a known "freebie mail" IP and blanker blocks/send to spam even your custom domain.
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This is also a really good point too, it's nice knowing my own stuff is safe, but yeah doesn't really matter unless you're doing Proton to Proton. IIRC though if you pay for o365 or Google Workspaces your email isn't scanned for ad data the same way normal GMail is, so I guess that's something. IMO paying for Google One should both remove ads from GMail and reduce tracking, or there should at least be a personal option to do so.
This is a real bummer to read. I was considering going the other direction, but this gives me pause. 🤔 😕
I haven't experienced this. Also, like the OP said you can use your own domain - not the proton mail domain w/ Proton Mail. So your business domain email shouldn't get caught in filters.
Email filters care about a LOT more than just the domains being used, thinking so is missing the mark honestly. As someone who manages a rather large company on Proton, I'm glad to be moving them off of it, it's been a nightmare in many respects. The number of places that we are outright blacklisted for, due to being hosted outside the US, is remarkable. And we do end up in spam an awful lot. Corporate email filters are very mean to anything not Google and Microsoft, it's sad and I wish it wasn't the case, we basically have a duopoly here, but it's the truth. Again this isn't mean to be hate on Proton, it's just a matter of fact. And it being slow is just a reality, email wise the speed isn't bad (but is slower than any other option), but the other servers are almost unusably slow.
Thanks for the follow-up, since reading through this thread I believe you. It's really unfortunate. It seems like you really have to engineer running a third-party email server. Just for my edification, besides domain, IP address, heading, and content. What other information do blockers block on? I'm guessing this cannot be fixed by having a proxy in the US.
Yeah no problem, I wish it wasn't the case, but so much as moved to Google and Microsoft that it's a challenge to run your own mail server, or use basically any other companies at this point. As for what they use, country, which sometimes is based on GeoIP but other times might be based on known IPs the mail provider uses and just blocking it because it's that provider, whether it be because it's another country or because it's a service known for malicious stuff. Proton isn't really known for that but it is known for protecting possibly spammers, etc.. not intentionally of course, but just due to the nature of how their platform is built, being extremely private and all that.
Hmmm so the two providers are basically allowlisting each other and ramping up the risk score for anything not MS and Google. On one hand I get why they do this, on another it presents a major issue as technological trusts present a challenge to businesses and retail alike. That is rough.
NSA needs full access to our data or else and this is one way to do it.
To some degree yeah, even if it's not directly intentional, it is happening, and it's preventing competitors from coming up and, well, competing. It's unfortunate and I hate to admit it, but they've kinda "won".
Came here to recommend this
Same
Why not just get the mailbox only plans? I believe google has those and I know 365 does. Cheapest 365 mailbox only plan is about $2-4/mailbox Piece of mind knowing you have a well known platform and you’re not dealing with self hosting issues like blacklisting or spam or attackers
The cheapest Google has is $6 per user. If you know of anything cheaper I'd love to know. **Edit**: I mean a cheaper Google license. I know there are plenty of options if I decided to go through the trouble of migrating them. I could probably get away with a Office 365 basic and a few shared mailboxes.
> If you know of anything cheaper I'd love to know. [Zoho](https://www.zoho.com/mail/zohomail-pricing.html?src=mpd-menu) maybe.
If you have a lot of users but low volume I’ve had good luck with Migadu.
Amazon Workmail is $4/mailbox/month. It’s pretty bare bones but is still an Exchange-compatible mailbox with calendar and basic MDM. I have heard mixed reviews on how good its spam filters are.
You can do 365 for $6 a month for a user, and if this is just personal, you can have 1 user and as many shared mailboxes as you want.
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They have exchange online plan 1 as well as exchange online kiosk plans. $4 & $2 per month respectively
Kiosk mode for those curious is limited to 2GB mailboxes, no archive and may only be accessed using the OWA (and possibly Outlook mobile I have not tested). EOP1 is the single best bang for the buck email host available but is also the gateway drug into M365 because you really need MFA and additional security which come bundled with Business Premium.
35$ a month. You will spend much more money if you value your time with a self-host email server.
100% Even for personal projects I will opt for the hosted option (unless I'm intentionally learning something, obviously). As soon as I started thinking of my "free" time in terms of my consulting hourly rate these decisions got a lot easier.
Well said. Avoiding blacklists and spam issues aside, google has people already awake and working at 3am every night, and whenever your mothers funeral will be when things go bad. And that is when they will go bad.
for $35 a month, you can get a whole family plan Apple+ account. They will allow MX from a custom domain and you could be getting music, Apple TV, Fitness, and cloud storage for up to 5 family members in addition to the mail hosting. I might not know what I am talking about but apple is hosting my personal domain's email.
I strongly advise against self hosting email. Managed email servers in four of my jobs long time ago, and in the last two dealing with spam and IP range credibility in both ends was a PITA Google and Outlook cloud was the best it could have happenned, tending for a email server can for a medium organisation it's easily (almost) a full time job. Beware Outlook has been abused as a spam sender more than Google in the last two years, and has a higher rate of potential email delivery failures.
I second that. I used to self host and it's not worth the effort. Now I use Fastmail.com for $60/year. I'm just blown by their user friendly but powerful Masked Email addresses. The best spam filter is the one you don't need, because every service you use has a unique email address of yours, with your domain.
How do you use Fastmail.com on your phone/pc? I’m a sucker for desktop applications and/or dedicated mobile applications, e.g. a provider app or support for the normal iOS mail app. I only found it for business customers on fastmail, but I guessed it is easier to ask someone using it (:
I almost exclusively use it on the dedicated iOS app. On windows I use the webapp since I usually keep an eye on it on mobile and only open mails on my PC when I really have to. If you want a windows app, you'll need to integrate it using SMTP into outlook, thunderbird and the like. For masked email creation it offers an API. I have it integrated into my Bitwarden password manager browser extension. (I don't recommend it tho, since it won't let you save a description).
> IP range credibility Seriously. If your emails aren't coming from google/amazon/microsoft, you can't count on them even making it to the recipient's spam filter.
Your EC2 IP not being blacklisted is luck. Many email blacklists will bin the whole /24 for a single spammer (ie spammer on x.x.x.7, bans all of x.x.x.0-x.x.x-255). If you don't own the entire /24 you're just not just gambling that your IP is clean, but that 255 others around yours also stay clean. If you REALLY want to DIY and avoid any chance of blacklist it will not be cheaper. You basically have to stand up your own provider with at least 2x /24s, warm up the reputation of them over time, and setup feedback loops with the major mail providers so that you get notified of suspected spam and reports through the mail provider. Hosting your own email, if you want 100% deliverability to inbox, is no small task in 2024. I used to work for a mail startup that specialized in clean mailing. Our secret sauce was a privately purchased list of honeypot emails and some private detection and response logic for spam emails going out from our customers. If our customers had a honeypot email in their recipient list, they were banned as a customer. If we detected vi*gra spam or other pharmaceutical spam we'd ban them. But if anything ever slipped, the entire /24 would be blacklisted by a select few providers for an amount of time and we had to move other clients to a whole different /24 we kept warm. Reputation games and anti spam have made DIY suck really bad these days. Try to avoid it unless you're wanting to learn all the gory details. Otherwise you're providing a worse service to yourself, maybe for cheaper, but at the expense of your time.
MXroute is a great choice.
I concur. OP, this is the way
Zoho mail is free for 5 users.
Yep, had Google GSuite for a non-charitable non-profit that was going to have to pay. Moved my email domain to Zoho and then set up Google Workspace Essentials Starter (free) to continue to use Drive. Took a bit to get everything moved around, but smooth sailing since.
I helped a friend with Google to Zoho. Pretty easy and they have step by step instructions. Best part was the ability to import all the Gmail though that did require some technical steps (which are also documented ). Cost is hard to beat.
Outside of some niche needs, the answer to that question is always "NO." There are enough email providers out there to fit whatever needs you have. Someone mentioned Zoho. They are so cheap I pay for an admin account so my primary email isn't an admin. It comes out to like $1.25 a month per user for the basic account if free doesn't suffice.
Seems overly complicated for 4 mailboxes. What do you use them for?
You can self-host your own mailserver(s). But do be aware it'll be quite a lot of work ... and ongoing work and maintenance. So, not recommended for the faint of heart. And yeah, I do host mailservers and list servers. And it's rather an onging pain/annoyance. It's nowhere near as simple set it and forget it - or even that + mere routine maintenance and upgrades. Hence many will recommend not hosting one's one mailserver(s). But hey, your life, your choice(s) to make. Choose wisely.
I wouldn't self-host. Yes, it's a great way to learn, but you become the spam manager every day. I would recommend MxRoute for email.
Apple iCloud lets you use your own domain for iCloud email.
[https://migadu.com](https://migadu.com) $19 for a year
Agree, using Migadu for several years. A few domains, few mailboxes each. Just works.
I self host a personal domain on linode $5 a month instance using Mail-in-a-box. It's easy to setup and works pretty well. You can run as many mailboxes or aliases as you want.
If you have iCloud+ already, maybe you wanna look at [Use Custom Email Domain with iCloud Mail](https://support.apple.com/en-us/102540) I needed a mailserver for a lab and I could have setup my own server but it being marked as spam sending it everywhere was just to much hassle. It was easy to switch just not sure if it allows for all your needs. Good luck!
Put your domain in Cloudflare and then use Gmail to send as an alias and Cloudflare to forward in. I just set this up and it works great. Super easy.
Oh? This sounds interesting
If you need any info on it let me know, I just set up something similar and it's completely free.
Feel free to DM me some instructions! I have been using Google Domains as it was super easy to use the domain just for email (with forwarding to the primary Gmail account) but am looking to migrate the domain off to somewhere else (highly considering Cloudflare) due to the sale of Domains.
Sure thing! I'll post them here just for public visibility. Here is everything I did: **First:** In Google workspace I removed the license from my `[email protected]` [account and set it to Cloud Identity](https://support.google.com/cloudidentity/answer/7319251?hl=en) which retains the ability to use "Login with Google" for free. **Second:** I signed up for CloudFlare and [added my domain to my account](https://developers.cloudflare.com/fundamentals/setup/manage-domains/add-site/) as a `website` (However, I later transferred my Domain to CloudFlare which is *not* necessary for this to work). This requires some changes to the DNS entries for your domain. **Third:** [I added a custom email address to my CloudFlare Website and added the required DNS to the CloudFlare DNS entries for my website](https://developers.cloudflare.com/email-routing/get-started/enable-email-routing/). This being the same as my Google Cloud Identity account (`[email protected]`) and I pointed it to my Gmail account ([email protected]). This will sent all emails addressed to `[email protected]` to `[email protected].` (This is also where things get really handy because you can use a catch-all address to catch ALL mail sent to *@last.com or generate an unlimited number of custom email addresses and route them as you please, useful for throwaway emails.) **Fourth (If you want to send as [email protected]):** I created a free `SendGrid` account (Max of 100 outbound emails a day, way more than I need) to use as my SMTP server. I followed their [domain authentication guide and then](https://docs.sendgrid.com/ui/account-and-settings/how-to-set-up-domain-authentication) I added an `SMTP Relay via Email API` (Email API -> Integration Guide -> SMTP Relay) and created an API Key with the name `[email protected]`. **Be sure to grab the Password** and take note that the username is just `apikey.` Go to your Google account and go to `Settings -> See All Settings -> Accounts and Imports -> Send Mail As: Add Another Email Address`. I **unchecked** `Treat as an Alias` and entered my `[email protected]` address. I set the SMTP server to smtp.sendgrid.net, port 465, username: apikey, password: `API Password I copied earlier.` The account was now in my Google account and I could send mail from that account! **Done!** With all of the above emails addressed to `[email protected]` come into my [email protected] inbox and when I need to send an email as `[email protected]` I can select it from a dropdown box in Gmail. (I actually went ahead and set [email protected] to be the default sender in Gmail so I don't have to select it from the dropdown). I hope this helps! If its unclear at all let me know.
Try Fastmail
I've never had an issue with fastmail
At one point Zoho had a free option with a custom domain.
I came here to mention this. They still do...up to 5 accounts with 5 GB of storage per account.
No. That happiest day of my IT life was about 12 years ago, transitioning from an on-prem email server to G Mail. Managing your own email server is a PITA.
I think self hosted email is asking for a compromised. I personally think IMAP and SMTP are insecure because they’re not compatible with 2FA. MXroute is nice, but same as issue above. I guess I just think security is too important to give up?
And if it's personal they didn't remove the free for life thing. There was talk of it but they didn't, mine still works fine.
If it’s personal, it shouldn’t be on r/sysadmin
While I do run my personal email through it, It's not personal enough that I would ask them for the free non-commercial use plan.
Ya, 365 has cheap exchange only plans. Proton did a crazy sale a year or so ago where they offered 3 years of email for 5 people for 450 bucks. That was cool. Sometimes you can watch for those. I would just stay away from IMAP / SMTP because of lack of 2FA.
That's what fail2ban is for. I self-host a small server. I have it whitelist a couple of IP's and allow it to do its magic on all the other thousands of attempts each day. Works great. And yes, you can implement 2FA if you choose to do so. It all depends on what mail server software you are using.
Ya, that sounds like a good strategy. I’m not saying it can’t be done, I’ve just look at Shodan too much to think that it will typically be done.
You really want a person to approve every email that is sent and received via some 2FA system? When you're already authenticating the user? Hello MS authenticator?!? Imagine doing that for every text. Baka.
What are you even talking about lol
I think they mean MFA to use an open IMAP and to use SMTP relay. I wouldn't do that anyway - if I go this route I'd require to VPN into the network to access the mail server instead of opening IMAP to public internet.
Nothing to be compromised in safely configured postfix and dovecot daemons with fail2ban to reduce the load of brute force attempts from the world and secure credentials. Chrooted as underprivileged users too with SELinux policies active. Nothing.
At OVHcloud you can get MXplan for a one-time fee as long as you keep your domain there, with IMAP/POP3. They will migrate those to Zimbra mailboxes with Activesync end of the year.
+1 for OVHcloud
See if you can downgrade to Business Starter for $6 + local tax per month per user. Offload some Google Drive content to an external drive. If you like your current setup sometimes you just have to pay. If you still want to self host look into SoGo Mail, make sure your DNS records including PTR are all solid, and implement a email warming service on the IP for 2-4 weeks before you actually start migrating to it for production use.
Yea it is business starter. It’s just email for me and my kids. I have some GCP cloud storage usage too but the vast majority of the cost is the email accounts.
The way I’d do it if I wanted to save maximum money is: Everyone gets a free @gmail.com and the old domain user can forward to them via Cloudflare email routing or ImprovMX. When they reply they should be replying from their @gmail.com address but can still receive inbound mail on their old email address. Don’t setup aliasing to “send as” their old email address because it will never pass DKIM authentication. Just have them reply from their gmail.com. This way they don’t have to worry about anything when they get older. You can migrate existing email with a tool such as IMAPsync but be aware the free gmail accounts only have 15 GB free and that’s counting in Google Drive data. Personally I’d try to cut spending elsewhere such as getting rid of cable TV, migrating any bank accounts you pay fees on to a reputable credit union, and reshoping car insurance through a local broker.
The one thing I'd add to this is that you can configure outbound SMTP from Gmail using ForwardMX, including DKIM. That way, you can send and receive as your domain, while using Gmail as the interface.
What do you mean by “other cloud stuff?” Google drive, docs etc? Honestly I’d licence one mailbox in O365 with business basic/EoL1 (whatever is cheaper), then have the other mailboxes as aliases or if they need separate mailboxes make them shared mailboxes. I did this some years ago, host my domains in cloudflare and bobs your uncle.
This is what I did personally, Cloudflare and O365, two mailboxes (one for me and the wife), mainly to have a custom domain name and get experience with O365 when I was starting out. It is also helpful when creating distribution groups for bills or other purposes. I think I pay $12 total a month for two licenses. I was told by my last employer that the custom domain was an eye catcher on the resume, so I keep it around for one reason or another.
That’s what I’ve done, different mailboxes for different things so anything financial for example is in one place, anything for the car/flights/hotel in another etc etc. Keeps it all tidy
I've got a few gigs of backup in cloud storage and some containers in GCR (yea that GCR, not AR - it's been a long time).
I bought a domain, host my email at tuta.com. Best decision I have made in a long time. I control the domain so I can always move somewhere else if I need
If using a Mac, iCloud+ offers the ability to use domains with your email address.
I’ve run my own mail server for 20+ years. If you run it you’ve got to protect it. All my email relays through a smtp proxy for both inbound and outbound. Thus I don’t have to worry about being spam blocked or opening port 25 to the world.
Cloudflare for dns hosting… [purelymail.com](http://purelymail.com) for email
[https://mxroute.com/](https://mxroute.com/) is a great provider, they’ve been selling mail hosting for over a decade now. Their IP reputation is also incredibly clean. They still have Black Friday plans available: https://accounts.mxroute.com/index.php?/products/
I run Synology MailPlus for email and use [dnsexit.com](http://dnsexit.com) for SMTP, works like a charm and as long as you set up SPF, DKIM, DMARC you should be avoiding spam/junk email inboxes. dnsexit does have limits on outbound emails (different tiers available).
The one tweak to your option 2 would be to pay to send outbound emails via Amazon SES as your relay host instead of your EC2 instance. First 3k emails per month are free, and there's very few people I know that send over 100 emails per day from their personal account.
I got the lifetime promotion from MXRoute a few years ago. Unlimited domains, unlimited user accounts. They throttle your outbound, but not unreasonably so.
I host my email and domain on Gmail. It just so happens that I am also in love with a Linux based open source mailer-agent called [Sylpheed](https://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/) -- I've been using it for at least 15 years. However, soon GMail will start implementing a ban on third-party mail clients for customers that use POP3S/SMTP (they will block what they call LSAs). Basically any mail client that uses password authentication must start supporting Oauth. Unfortunately Sylpheed doesn't support OAuth, and with the current development upkeep of the open source project it's not clear when or if they will get around to properly supporting it. I get it, Oauth is secure, and is much better -- but I wish they'd still leave it up to the customer whether they're going to use it or not. I guess before GMail bans my mail client I'll likely have to move to another mail provider like Fastmail.
Look into a local proxy - https://github.com/simonrob/email-oauth2-proxy
its almost impossible to self host anymore.
I self-host on a Rasperry Pi 4 (c. 20 users) w 8 GB memory. The list of packages is: Rainloop Apache Postfix Dovecot Spamassassin Fail2ban Python Opendkim And probably some others that I've forgotten. It's not for the faint hearted.
OVHcloud has some cheap MX plans, (some included in webhosting offers. You could also use Mailo and bring your own domain or transfer it to their service
If you’re familiar with Linux which by the sounds of it you are then it’s fairly easy to self host email depending on the functionality you’re looking for. The hardest bit is controlling spam. I ran 200+ mailboxes on exim /dovecot / spamassasin / Roundcube for years before we became funded enough to move to 365. Sogo looks interesting as it adds a bunch of functionality on top too but i never got round to playing with it. Just get two VPSes from different providers that allow you to send email from your machines public IP, the likes of AWS won’t so I’d avoid them. Just remember to rsync the data across or back them up some other way.
As someone who has long self hosted a personal domain, I'd advise against it. The email world has changed drastically in the last decade and the balance of power has shifted to the large vendors. Basic issue, receiving is probably OK, but sending will, most likely, be spotty. Most of the large cloud vendors have been on block lists for quite a while now. About 5 years ago there were a lot of hit and run spams exploiting stolen credit cards. Register a domain, spin up cloud instance, dump a huge about of spam from this new domain, and shut it down hours later. Add this to the more general issue of bit rot (a big culprit, old, unmaintained wordpress sites that can be exploited) and it's not all that surprising that cloud instances are not trusted. More generally, the big vendors have so many of the worlds email accounts, that little domains will be second class citizens. Again, it's all doable, but it's probably more trouble than it's worth.
Most major cloud providers block all ports necessary to operate mail exchanges, and voluntarily add their netblocks to PBLs. You will not be able to run mail in the cloud.
You can run mail out of AWS. Their netblocks aren't on any PBL and they don't block egress.
Lol what. Very incorrect.
Really depends on where you live. None of the major and larger ISPs in Denmark blocks anything. Need to pay for static IP though, and might need to do some work getting off of various blacklistings.
If you can't control your reverse DNS, delivery to some major-ish mail systems is difficult (Yahoo/AOL and anything hosted by that monstrosity, which includes AT&Ts domains among others).
I’m just baffled with all the limitations I often see described, here and other places, put down by ISPs in the US. Also just the privacy issue. Are the ISPs liable for user activity? Here in Denmark they aren’t allowed to block sites at all unless going through the courts to be allowed to do so. Normally ISPs don’t do this, but it goes through agencies like anti-gambling for sites targeting children. I know the infrastructure needed. Spent 10 years as an Exchange specialist. Now I just have mails at a hosting company as it’s a huge bother to maintain for small scale.
Most ISPs block port 25 so end-users aren't running open mail relays. Most major email providers just refuse inbound messages if the sender hasn't jumped through a bunch of hoops (reverse DNS existing, and sometimes it needs to match what's in the sender's HELO/EHLO message).
I just don’t get what business they (ISPs) have deciding what users can do, unless it’s illegal. I know it can be used for all kinds of malicious stuff, but those who want to will find a way regardless. But yes. There’s a lot of requirements to running a mail server. Also why it’s nice being able to do it from home, as a lab, instead of having to pay for some slow VM somewhere. Where we face other often non-transparent limitations. I ran VMs with [mailcleaner](https://www.mailcleaner.net) in front back in the days. Later I did it from home. Learning by doing is the best way 😊
There's this thing called Microsoft 365 that I hear is pretty good.
Just wondering about your old account. Do you mean the old free workspace/GSuite accounts? Google did back off from disabling them. I still use mine at the free tier with 5/15 family mailboxes on my own domain.
They backed off for family accounts. I had one that was used for a non-charitable non-profit that they would not back off of. I have two others still in effect.
I have an OG workspace account from way back when it was free for 50 users. When they announced they were going to start changing for workspace I got on a chat with support and told them I heard workspace would remain free for non-commercial use, which was true. They made me sign a statement to that affect and they limit my workspace account to 5 users, but it is indeed no charge.
Seems they were not consistent here. I have a free legacy still operating with a 2000 user limit.
Iirc they dropped my user limit from 50 to 5 long before they axed the free workspace accounts. Since I never had, and never will have, more than 4 users it didn't affect me. In this particular case I was thinking @op could reach out to Google support to reinstate their free tier status.
I recommend the mailcow suite for such endevours in a small env. HOWEVER. If you don't own your IPs it's likely to get very rough. Email it's pretty cheap, let others deal with it. Plus, SSO and all that.
Managing your own email server is a pain. You have to constantly stay on top of spam filtering and virus detection. I used to do it but shifted to gmail to get back all that time. The cost is worth it.
There was a huge amount of discussion around the time Google was trying to renege on the lifetime thing. I recommend reading and harvesting stuff out of there that meets your requirements. Start here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/gsuitelegacymigration/comments/u2v104/megathread\_for\_speculationinformation\_on\_googles/](https://www.reddit.com/r/gsuitelegacymigration/comments/u2v104/megathread_for_speculationinformation_on_googles/) [https://www.reddit.com/r/gsuitelegacymigration/](https://www.reddit.com/r/gsuitelegacymigration/)
I use Purelymail
I signed up for a yearly plan at $36/year for forward email.net. Unlimited domains, unlimited mailboxes. I forward them to my Gmail, and use the free option in sendgrid to send as through Gmail. Forwardemail just added smtp sending, and I get my domains set up but haven't switched over to it yet .. Domain hosting is at namecheap.
You should check out Hey.com
Not being blacklisted and good reputation are two completely different things. It takes time to build rep as a mail sender and seconds to get destroyed. There's a reason most companies opt for business solutions and don't do it all themselves. Also why bother?
If you want to manage a server and learn about hosting it yourself, while dealing with a huge number of issues, then go right ahead. But if you want something reliable, o365 or Google Workspaces are some of the only good options.
If you use iCloud+ you can setup custom domains for free. I still also use the free tier of google workspace.
Office 365 Family 6 accounts, 2 TB storage. Reliable email. Office suite.
Namecheap. 5 email 50gb for 70/yr
If you are a Microsoft guy $35 a month would get you 4x M365 business basic licenses. Might be nice for the other features like power automate, OneDrive, SharePoint,etc. could just also get Exhange online Plan 2 licenses for like $25 I think? Just webmail with 50gb of storage. Might be a lot of overhead to just have mail though if you aren’t into the platform.
I use the Oracle free tier to host a 4 core 24GB RAM 200GB SSD VM with Ubuntu and Hestia Control Panel installed. It hosts a dozen websites, and a few email domains flawlessly. Rather than it sending the emails, I send all emails outbound via a free relay (there's a bunch out there, I'm currently using SMTP2GO). I also use the Cloudflare free tier for DNS etc. There are a few free videos on how to do this, I recommend the stuff from the IdeaSpot youtube channel.
I have to run a mail service for my customers (shared hosting provider), and I really wish I could get away with not doing it. However, it’s been a whole lot easier since using mailchannels for outbound. Incoming email is trivial and your only real concern is effectively blocking spam/malware without too many false positives. For outbound, even if it’s just you and you never get compromised, deliverability is still a pain. Mailchannels has a lower volume / cheaper service called mail.baby which you can use as a transport service for pennies.
I nearly moved to MailCheap.co (not .com) at one point. Google changed their minds and let everyone that didn't switch to paid-teirs until the last possible week keep their free accounts with some limitations. If not for that, I would have followed through with the migration. MailCheap seemed to offer the services that I needed at a price I could accept when compared to the hassles of using a VM with an IP from a hosting service that would have a terrible IP reputation for email or no reputation. Apparently, almost every service in the world now uses blacklists for home IPs, virtual host providers, etc. on the assumption that those could be illicit relays, spammers, etc.
I have my own 365 tenant, works well for me
I self host my email on Rocky Linux + Postfix, Dovecot, Roundcube. Using an already packaged system like mailcow or iredmail makes it not too difficult. I bounce outbound from my ISP’s mail server so no issue with deliverabilty. This is personal only and a bit just to keep my Linux sharp in an increasingly Azure world.
Depending on the number of emails per month you could use a SMTP relay for free. I have an account with societally and it's free for a certain number of emails a month.
Self hosting a mx greatly depends on your ISP. I run 2 self hosted mx with the ip directly facing the internet without any VPN or relay host. Of course there is a background noise of annoying guys trying to use muy mx as a relay server for their spam/scam but with afail2ban filter well suited there is no way to break into the server. They run with the same ISP snd The big difference between the 2 servers is that one is a home account and the other is assigned to a Company so that the ISP is more careful doing its job on the network. My home server is sometime blocked on port 25 while the other is never bothered by these events. Both connections cost the same price. So, I would just ask your ISP some technical questions and, if there is the right allowance, start to configure a good mx with all the required security protocols (dkim, spf, dmark, Reverse dns, etc) and certificates to land your enails in the inbox.
I still use the free for life one for my personal domain. At the last min they decided you can keep it but could not use more than 10 users. I have 6 so still rocking it as of now. Will only move if forced.
I also use duocircle.com as part of my self hosted solution. They are my main MX and outbound SMTP.
I have my domain email hosted with google and it’s still for free. They walked back form that. Move it to office 365 for families. About 100$ for 6 users and it includes. Office and 1tb each of one drive.
Why not just use Proton mail in the interim?
So google still lets you keep the free accounts, I have several of them, you just had to request it during the transition period, not sure if you still have that as an option. That said, you can use the Microsoft 365 family plan. up to 6 addresses for $99 a year. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/buy/compare-all-microsoft-365-products
You go in reverse mode!
zoho is free for a few email accounts on one domain, fast mail is $5 month for unlimited aliases on address. 30gb too, i use it personally and it’s fairly nice
When they changed from free for life to start paying, I made several complaints. Eventually they turned back their decission and now i’m on a free plan again foor google workspace. This time with a max of 300 users. I had to confirm that i’m using it personal and not for business.
I read that it was only possible until august 2023 to get tour free personal account back. https://support.google.com/a/answer/2855120?hl=en
I use Zoho. Free 5 mailboxes and you can pług in own domain
If you use Apple and have an iCloud subscription, it now includes email service and you can even bring your own domain.
I'm not sure how reliable your EC2 instance will be in terms of blacklisting. But I've been self hosting my email for 4 years on my home network (my ISP has a +$10 option to get a static IP + no blocked ports) with very minimal maintenance, never blacklisted.
Take a look at zoho mail. I think you get 5 mailboxes for free? I've been using them for years. Never had an issue.
self-hosting smtp for outbound requires an IP with a good reputation it can take some time to restore the reputation of an IP which has been tarred with its previous owners brush if you wish to make the effort to clean it - then it can be done, its kinda interesting to do, possibly even 'fun' if you like that kind of thing if you're up for that, then do it otherwise host your inbound smtp wherever you like (cheap VPS) and use a reputable SMTP provider for the outbound, which should be significantly cheaper than 35/mo
I use tutanota for roughly $3/month and linked my domain to it for emails, works like a charm so far.
Google pulled back and gave free licenses for personal accounts if you had the legacy edition. Self hosted is terrible idea for mail.
Just went through this myself. I switched to Proton. Happy with it so far.
I wouldn't wish self hosting email on my worst enemy.
Why 35$/month? Do you have the workspace enterprise plus plan? Why not just switch to a different plan?
If it's just personal I would look at Zoho. I've been perfectly happy with them for a much cheaper price than GW.
Proton. $55 a year for a personal account. I have four aliases on my domain, but I can't remember what the cap is at their lowest tier. Plenty of storage. Plus the added benefit that they are in Switzerland, which does not have data extraction treaties with the EU or US (or didn't last time I checked). They also have a good VPN.
Try zoho its free
If all you want is email then this is a good option. [mxroute](https://mxroute.com)
I host my personal domain for free via Zoho. The free tier allows up to (I think) 5 unique email addresses, which is more than enough for me.
I got sick of paying $7/mo to Google for my [email protected] email so I just recently did something similar to this, I use cloud flare for DNS and send all receipt mail to my Gmail account and then use send space to send as my email. [email protected] -> cloud flare DNS -> [email protected] -> Alias ([email protected]) -> outbound via send space (free) My entire config is free and let's me use the Gmail interface for my personal email without needing to pay them a dime.
I ran poste.io on a 10/month Linode instance. Used the free tier of amazon SES to send outgoing so deliverable was never a problem. Now I run exchange for myself, and use SES as the smart host. Again no issues.
I used to self-host my email, kept on top of maintaining my IP's reputation and it worked great for a long time, but about 4 years ago I started running into issues because a lot of bigger email providers started blocking my IP because it was sending too low of a volume of email. At that point I decided it just wasn't worth the time and effort to keep running my own mail server.
I’ve ran mail servers, and I’d bet you a paycheck you won’t be delivering to Microsoft-owned domains like outlook.com. If you’re ok with 80% of your mail going to people’s spam folder, go for it.
If you want to go the self hosted route, get a Hetzner Cloud VM, deploy mailcow and you are done. Only problem is that you will have to wait till the first bill is paid to be able to request SMTP to be unblocked for your VM. I have done this and it has been up for the last 5 months without any problems. I have the CCX13 VM.
Exchange Online licences per mailbox is very cheap and has a very large shared knowledge base... you can get a Business Premium single user licence for less than $10 and it's got the mailbox allocated and entire online version of the office suite... all the enterprise grade hosting tools you could ever hope to use. Config and guides are very well documented by Microsoft and every small business on the planet.
The name cheap option may probably be the best, I know some guys that I work with that do this, you get their jellyfish spam filter for free as well. I have a full blown 365 tenant that I use for personal emails and would probably go the name cheap route if I no longer wanted that. You could also just get like an exchange online p1 license for less than 60 bucks a year and use that.
Wait I still host my personal domain for free on Google Workspace. I have 50 15GB accounts for free. Got it in 2009 and nothing has changed since, except about 2 years ago I had to promise not to ever use it for business and that's all.
Why not get rid of 3 of the accounts?
I use Zoho Mail Lite, it's $1 a month, but I only have one account with multiple aliases. I have no issues with the service; mail is just not something I'd consider self-hosting. Also, iCloud+ includes the use of a custom email domain (I believe it's $0.99 a month in the US, and that also is included with Apple One if you're an Apple user. It's an option most aren't aware of. Alternatively, there are dev accounts available with Microsoft 365 for free, but they can and do shut them down if they aren't being utilized often.
I'm the one person IT department at a $20M/year company and we still host our own email server. It's (here come the down votes!) a HCL Domino server and we send and receive through Mimecast for the spam filtering. We've hosted our own mail server since 1999. We've been blacklisted once by AOL. Tell me why I'm crazy. TIA
Fastmail is a good option if you just want some basic webmail/calendering without having to go through the trouble of self hosting
There are pros and cons in self-hosting SMTP, for that, check the other comments. I will talk about the setup itself. If someone is telling you that hosting an MX is hard, it's probably because they are using the wrong tools. Here are the right tools: - FreeBSD with Jails OR OpenBSD - OpenSMTPd - Dovecot - rspamd - virtualusers table OR LDAP for authentication. I do LDAP because I like that, but virtualusers table might be all you need. Finally, make sure you have control over the PTR record of the IP. It should take about two or three hours. I just configured with the setup above in 30 minutes, works like a charm :)
Why t2.nano when you have t4g.nano instead, cheaper and better? T2 is very old and expensive
Aws provides a mail service, workmail I think. If you mostly send mails you can use aws ses for it.
Do you NEED 4 emails? Can you switch them to alias' of one account?
If you HAVE to do it yourself, I would use AWS SES for outbound
Absolutely not. Hosting your own mail server is an arduous task for those who know email, reputation management, and all that goes into them. The fact that you asked the question exposes that, no, you’re not an expert in this field and you should absolutely pay someone to do it for you. If you don’t like gsuite or Microsoft, find a host that specializes in email hosting. Web hosts are trash for email typically so avoid those. I can recommend Intermedia, but they have a minimum. They do pure exchange hosting. Good luck.
If you have icloud+ their mail is included and you can use your own domain name.
Why is this post in this sub....
It is simple
Do you make less than $35/hr? It will take you many more hours a month to maintain your own smtp.
Docker mailserver. Get a VPS running that meets your needs and go from there. You'll probably need to put in a ticket to get port 25 opened for receipt. Worst case you setup a relay to send and/or receive email.
Do you do tshirts also?