The easiest way to have control of your email is probably to buy a domain name (such as example.com) and then use this on an account from an independent email provider.
If you're ever unhappy with a provider, you can switch to a different one without changing your email address because the domain still belongs to you.
There are lots of independent email providers, all of them let you use your own domain. For example @Tutanota, @fastmail and @protonmail are very popular.
p.s. It is technically possible to also set up your own email server, but apparently it is a lot more tricky than one might think:
https://social.growyourown.services/@homegrown/108555028721713290
(In summary, almost everyone with experience of it felt it wasn't worth the hassle for non-technical people.)
By using an existing email provider with your own domain, you can avoid the technical hassles while still having the option of changing providers in the future.
Does anyone here have experience of running their own email instance? Would you say it is viable for a non-technical individual to run their own email service? Do you have any lessons to pass on? #AskFedi #AskFediverse #AskTheFediverse
Thanks, that seems to tally with other people's experiences!
Yes, @homegrown , I agree!
I've been running an email server for my family and sometimes for some friends for many years (decades).
But now, I am fed up with how this demands chunks of my time.
Installing and maintaining spam fighting measures is a pain in the ass, and to get Microsoft's mail servers to accept our mail is like a fight against windmills.
I've had enough of it and will put handling our email into professional hands soon.
Yeah, I was just considering doing a follow-up reply about that! 😁
I asked for advice a while back from people who ran their own email instances, here's what they said:
https://social.growyourown.services/@homegrown/108555028721713290
(In summary, most felt it wasn't worth the hassle, especially for non-technical people.)
Does anyone here have experience of running their own email instance? Would you say it is viable for a non-technical individual to run their own email service? Do you have any lessons to pass on? #AskFedi #AskFediverse #AskTheFediverse
@homegrown Ah, much appreciated! I'm reasonably technical, so I'll have to dive into the tradeoffs to see if it's worth it.
I'm also hosting some services on a residential connection at the moment, and I remember a lot of service providers (at least used to) block SMTP outbound. That might ultimately be the determining factor for me.
@CiscoJunkie @homegrown i can only echo what people said there.
i am a technical person, and i am all for self-hosting stuff and a proper decentralized web. but i have a cheap privacy focused email hoster which offers everything i need, and i do absolutely nothing. of course with my own domain on top.
@CiscoJunkie @homegrown It's not just a technical issue, even if you do everything right, there's still high chance that you have to continuously send support emails to Microsoft/Google so they stop greylisting you once again, since somebody from the same IP block did something stupid.
Though hosting your own imap/pop server and getting the smtp part from a provider works pretty well.
I haven't dug through all the replies. But an big thing they do not touch upon is mailer domain reputation.
The big email providers/handlers do not really like tiny players. The big ones, like Google or Microsoft apply reputations. If your volume is too low, you will not get a positive reputation. This could lead to your email getting marked as spam (or delayed and even discarded), even though your DKIM, DMARC, SPF, etc. is 100%.
It is rather ironic as a lot of (forum/account) spammers use gmail, outlook, yahoo email addresses.
@jackyan @elmuerte @CiscoJunkie
Makes you wonder if Google/MS have other reasons for blocking smaller providers... 🤔
@lautre
But you are not on a dynamic ip range, right?
@jonbradbury @homegrown Yeah, email has become such a core method of communication that I don't think I'd want to have to worry about a personal on-call to keep it running smoothly. 😆
Currently I'm serving up a few things that are much less critical (notes, media), and my worst case scenario for this breaking is "my friends can't watch the shitty movies on my server." I think I'd like to keep things at that level.
@Robin_Van_Ee @homegrown I do basic monitoring on my personal infrastructure, so my self-SLA is acceptable to me.
That said, you've hopefully seen the other replies and comments about the time sink not being worth it. Monitoring is a problem I can solve for; maintaining a good sender reputation and dealing with ongoing threat management doesn't sound like a great use of my personal time.
Good point, thanks!
If a domain works on one email provider, is there a chance it won't work on another provider? Or is it an "all or nothing" situation?
Ahh, gotcha! Okay, so slightly older TLDs might work better as services have had time to notice their existence?
Good point.
Some services support importing emails, but not all. It would be something to check when deciding on a provider.
For example @fastmail supports importing old emails:
https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/360058753594-Import-your-mail
@homegrown @jawnsy @fastmail
Agreed, don't host your own SMTP server: get the experts (e.g. @beasts) to do that.
But nothing prevents you running your own IMAP server as a homegrown email archive. Strictly speaking IMAPS, as I use dovecote with a Let's Encrypt certificate.
An email client like @thunderbird lets you create IMAP profiles for your old account, your new one and your home archive. You can then move your existing email between them as required.
@jawnsy @homegrown I recently moved my mail hosting (under my vanity domain) from Google Workspace to Fastmail. Fastmail has an importer that’s basically fire-and-forget.
If you move to a service that doesn’t have an importer, doing it by hand would be tedious but possible.
@homegrown @Tutanota @fastmail @protonmail warning: this can be a gateway drug however. You start thinking 'oh, I'll just have one domain for my email' then five years later you own a dozen domains forwarding to your main email, some of which are jokes you've forgotten the punchline to, but you'll keep renewing them all anyway.
Custom domains. Not even once.
There was a trending post the other day saying the Fediverse was just a way to sell more domain names 😁
@homegrown @Tutanota @fastmail @protonmail
I actually just did this with robotlove.dev, as I wanted a place to write a dev log. While I still haven't gotten around to posting anything, I do appreciate that I can have a provider-independent email address.
I'd suggest adding PurelyMail to the list of providers. For better or worse, configuration is more hands-on than anyone else on your list but it's cheap and there's no fee for extra domains.
And you can set up wildcard alias for your email addresses, so you can just add whatever junk you want to the end of your address when you sign up at a sketchy site and block that address when necessary.
Or use something like https://www.pobox.com/ to forward to other email providers. Especially useful when you can't convince the people on your domain to decide on one email provider.
I don't know, it would probably need a proper comparison to be done by some tech journalists?
I have used a few indie providers and they've all been okay about spam, but obviously that's just for my account. I don't know how well it works for other people.
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