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.
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?
Grow Your Own Services 🌱
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Beutlin
Keith Ivey
ananas
…might work for coffee…
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