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?
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
Bob@notgoogle.com
Stacked not google.com
Alias:
Costco.Bob@notgoogle.com
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.
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!