I have to ask this. Is there a service where I could bring my own FQN like Notgoogle.com and then have them handle emails for me? But with a twist… I want notgoogle.com to send and receive emails via that outside entity, but I want to send the emails from a self hosted server that maybe has mailcow or similar and I want that same server to receive the emails from the outside company. Ideally the outside company is basically just a relay from my IP to the outside world and vise versa. The outside company would basically hold the emails until my server checked and downloaded them. any advice on this. Hopefully with a useful step by step guide from somewhere in the webs?
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- For incoming mail, on your server run a mail retrieval agent like fetchmail to fetch mail from the externally hosted mailbox into a maildir on your server.
- To serve that maildir to your clients, on your server run a mail delivery agent like the IMAP server Dovecot.
- To accept outgoing mail from your clients, on your server run something like Postfix with a
relayhostconfigured with the details of your externally hosted SMTP server.
There’s nothing unusual or tricky about any of this arrangement.
Okay! I see. I only need to have the IMAP and SMTP ports open to NGNIX and routed to the internal IP.
Sure! That’s an SMTP Relay. A lot of folks jumped on the poopoo wagon. It’s common wisdom in IT that you don’t do your own email. There are good reasons for that, and you should know why that sentiment exists, however; if you’re interested in running your own email: try it! Just don’t put all of your eggs in one basket. Keep your third party service until you’re quite sure you want to move it all in-house (after due diligence is satisfied and you’ve successfully completed at least a few months of testing and smtp reputation warming).
Email isn’t complex. It’s tough to get right at scale, a pain in the ass if it breaks, and not running afoul of spam filtering can be a challenge. It rarely makes sense for even a small business to roll their own email solution. For an individual approaching this investigatively it can make sense so long as you’re (a.) interested in learning about it, (b.) find the benefits outweigh the risks, and (c.) that the result is worth the ongoing investment (time and labor to set up, secure, update, maintain, etc).
What’ll get you in trouble regardless is being dependent on that in-house email but not making your solution robust enough to always fill its role. Say you host at home and your house burns down. How inconvenient is it that your self-hosted services burned with it? Can you recover quickly enough, while dealing with tragedy, that the loss of common utility doesn’t make navigating your new reality much more difficult?
That’s why it rarely makes sense for businesses. Email has become an essential gateway to other tooling and processes. It facilitates an incredible amount of our professional interactions. How many of your bills and bank statements and other important communication are delivered primarily by email? An unreliable email service is intolerable.
If you’re going to do it make sure you’re doing it right, respecting your future self’s reliance on what present-you builds, and taking it slow while you learn (and document!) how all the pieces fit together. If you can check all of those boxes with a smile then good luck and godspeed says I.
Derek, thanks for giving a great answer. Your answer was an actual answer rather than just saying don’t.
That doesn’t work. Spam has made it not possible, sorry. Pay someone else who has a trustworthy IP
I backed “Run your own Mail Server”, its a good start but email hosting is tricky.
It’s even trickier when your ISP blocks your fucking email port. Thanks, Starlink.
have you read it? i considered buying it a while ago but was unsure, quite high price for an ebook that you cannot glimpse into (like with real books at the store some time ago) i thought. Also i learned a “bit” about most of its topics myself long ago.
tricky yes, but very learnable too.
I get pretty much anything Michael Lucas writes. The information is always great and his writing style is fun to read.
Important to note: it’s not a step-by-step guide to copy and paste and have a mail server running. It’s all about understand all the stuff that goes into it.
thanks for your opinion.
i already have my own mailservers running for roughly two decades now so copy-paste is not what i am looking for.
i ordered that email book and mastering dnssec from him now as i am a bit curious about some topics within the email book and want to dive into dnssec now cz i also host dns for my domains and improvement is always good ;) last time i started with dnssec i got distracted and that was it.
In that case, I’m sure you’ll enjoy it. I’ve been reading a little bit before I go to bed and learning a lot that I glossed over when I set up my own mail server years ago. He and Alan Jude wrote some ZFS books as well that I keep coming back to and picking up new tricks each time.
I would just get set up on MxRoute and use whatever selfhosted service you want to interact with it.
if the goal is simply to ‘de-google’, then mxroute itself is enough. 3rd party. decent policies. good track record. reasonable price (especially their promos).
Email is the one thing I have stopped trying to do myself. It just has too many things that you absolutely need to keep updated. Have a look at Forward Email (https://forwardemail.net/en). They can hook up to pretty much any domain setup you already have, and do the heavy lifting for you.
Yeah same here. I just want to catch the emails as one would from Thunderbird but be able to share one account with my wife but without having to rely on keeping our emails on their server… That’s the current gmail problem, our emails are on there, they decide to train their AI or whatever with the emails and they just email you an opt out. I’m done with that. Worst is that you can’t quickly delete nor save and backup anything.
For backing up your email from gmail or any other provider, check out MailStore Home edition: https://www.mailstore.com/en/products/mailstore-home/ It will grab everything in the account and store it locally, and then allow you to push it back onto any other imap service when necessary. Great for migrating your email, and keeping a just-in-case backup.
What’s the point of hosting a local server in this case, instead of just using a mail client?
maybe multiple mail clients are configured to connect to a local server in an office while that server is configured to outside world and also fetches each mail only once. changing of outisde world provider then does not make you reconfigure all mail clients, but only your central once.
I would say something similar if not exactly.
I’m just looking forward to de-googling my life before my kids are old enough to get Hooked on that shit themselves.
My basic idea is that maybe I can’t or shouldn’t host my own email server. But 15gig limits with constant nagging to pay up, so gmail is not the answer. That gets old quick. I want to just download the files into a central device that my wife and I have access to. But that has been thus far technically obfuscated. I’m not sending thousands of emails per day, just a family level of correspondence.
Ideally my wife and I would login thru our phones to send and receive emails from a common email space that only lives at home. The emails would be routed to the outside entity who would do the actual sending and receiving. I have some basic things that I’m starting to like…email aliases and having my own email domain.
I currently have my own domain on cloud flare but they don’t proxy email servers. So here I be. I want for example to use e-mail like this:
Basic form: notgoogle.com
Stacked not google.com
Alias:
One time use or specific use:
Karenwantsmyemail@notgoogle.com
I already tried serving my own server and all this was possible. But it was insecure in that you can easily go find my IP address and my real address. I don’t want that, don’t really mind if someone knows it, but I don’t want to be spearphished. And so that’s where my desires for a local server that not my wife and I can access and use like gmail but safely come from.
Rant: In general, oh God! Are we fucking retarded? I have a 2 TB disk, I got high speed internet… A rando in China can call my phone but somehow I can’t get a rando to send me email? There’s something wrong with that picture. Or maybe I should do exactly what I do with my phone number… Not use it at all unless it’s family. You can spoof phone numbers, voices and emails. Maybe I should setup a Lemmy instance instead and just use this as a form of communication. The only problems being that my computer sometimes goes down due to power failure or IP change or some other reason, and nobody else would want to use my server…like the kids school or the DMV etc. Anyhoo…
for the 15gb limit it would be sufficient to just get a VM with enough space (in a datacenter or at home, maybe a rapsberry pi) and run an imap , an mta and something to fetch the mails from google so that they are archived and dont fill in the limited space. i think if i were you, i would begin with just that cz that is the annoying thing and it is always possible to change the setup as wished once it is under your control.
i personally would not want to use mailcow but dovecot, postfix and fetchmail directly. fetchmail gets the mails from google and places it into dovecots imap storage while postfix would be used to send mails through google to the outside world using your google credentials. then you’ld have google as the external service to begin with and your server to actually host the emails and configure the phones to send emails through it or directly through google but just get the emails from it and save sent mails there. later you could add another nongoogly service so that fetchmail gets these emails too and just extend the setup.
if you have that, you can send/receive emails when you are at home.
but before downloading (moving) the first mails from the google storage to there i would ensure that an (incremental) backup is already running well and automatically just in case of disk failures.
But it was insecure in that you can easily go find my IP address and my real address. I don’t want that, don’t really mind if someone knows it, but I don’t want to be spearphished.
i have pretty good experience with giving every contact a separate email alias under my domain to communicate with me. my email aliases usually are like <contactshortname>-<randomnumber>@mydomain.tld
that is for a newsletter from somecoolpage.com it would look like coolpage-61514@mydomain.tld
it is near to impossible to guess that random number so i get nearly no emails from other than my real contacts cz only they know a valid address. that alias is only used for this one thing, a contact, a shop even a friend (or group of friends). mails go all into the same inbox but when i receive spam or phishing on it, i 1. know who has leaked my data and 2. i can change the alias to a new number, delete the old alias and thus stop any future spam on that address. this way i have no extra spam filters but also near to no spam.
However your ip address can be found in any email you send in the received headers. is that what you want to prevent, or just the public ip when running an internet facing mailserver with mx records pointing to it ? with ip changes beeing a thing i guess you tried to run the mailserver behind your home internet connection, nonstatic ips are bad for email, you could get a ipv6 tunnel from hurricane electric (still free?) then have static ipv6 addresses, but google afair does not allow you to send them emails via ipv6 and thus i blocked them so they cannot send me emails via ipv6 too, so i think communicating to google victims might be a problem due to google lacking behind current tech. so your idea to use a third party service fits perfectly if you dont want to run your own public mailserver. do you have a vpn to your home network to use the homeserver from remote?
This is exactly the setup I want. Man, I got thousands of notifications and spam pretending to be real notifications I’m tired of it.
I don’t actually want to need to VPN into my home network. I want to use the Mozilla K9 app and login like that if possible. So we would login to the server via some sort of app, in the background the server would send and receive emails and so we would never again touch gmail directly. And exactly, we could add a side service to transition over seamlessly. And how you describe the email addresses for individual purpose is excellent. Spam? Want me to unsubscribe? How about I delete the email address, and you waste your time emailing? I love it!
