Self-hosting

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Hosting your own services. Preferably at home and on low-power or shared hardware.

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E-Mail with own domain (programming.dev)

submitted 3 days ago by Gobbel2000@programming.dev to c/selfhosting@slrpnk.net

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I was thinking about how to improve my email situation, because at the moment I am using an address of a commercial mail provider, which obviously brings some concerns of lock-in.

While fully self-hosting the email is an option, I am a bit wary of this, because having a working email is very critical and I do trust the commercial providers to give better uptime and reliability than my old server in the closet. Does anyone have experience hosting an email service and what is it like/could you recommend it?

The other option that I am more inclined to is having the email hosted by some cloud provider, but using an address under my personal domain name. The point would be of course that I could change the email provider while keeping the address. Which providers supporting this could you recommend? What is the process like linking a domain to an email host?

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[–] berber@feddit.org 4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (3 children)

you are correct in being wary of self-hosting email, i cannot recommend it. a lot can go wrong. besides downtime (already pretty bad by itself) i have known cases of domains and/or server IPs being blacklisted/spamlisted on multiple big mailservers (microsoft, google) because of bad administration, effectively killing the self-hosted setup.

you would definitely want a static IP (as opposed to updating DNS entries all the time), a solid spam setup, and multiple failsafes, meaning not just data backup, but also mechanisms for preventing downtime like secondary machines. it really is only worth it if multiple people make use of it and you have multiple dedicated admins, in my opinion. but in that case, i think it can be very cool.

as others have pointed out, a good (and in some sense the canonical) option is to use something like mailbox.org with your own domain, or other providers, or even a webhosting package from netcup or hetzner or similar. these are all solid, and you have professional support.

side note: downside is, your data there is more snoopable, less so with something like proton. but that shouldn't be your biggest worry, since emails always exist not just on your server, but also on the other side of the communication, and you have no guatantees for privacy there. e2ee (like pgp) is what you would need in that case.

[–] activistPnk@slrpnk.net 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

side note: downside is, your data there is more snoopable, less so with something like proton.

Can you elaborate? AFAIK, Protonmail only gives e2ee in 2 rare situations:

Both parties use PM
The non-PM user has a PGP key and the PM user is competent enough to add the key to their PM address book. (This is where Hushmail is superior to PM, but HM is not gratis)

In all other scenarios (no e2ee), PM traffic and data-at-rest is just as exposed as conventional non-PM.

[–] berber@feddit.org 2 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

actually, i was talking out of my ass a little. i am not sure itself how things work, i was under the impression that proton can't access your clear text mails, once they are stored (of course, they can build backdoors that snoop when receiving mails, but we shall not assume this), similar to how mailbox.org allows you to have all incoming mails be immediately encrypted via your chosen pgp key, effectively having e2ee. i was under the impression proton did this automatically and stuff, i mean why else do you need to use their own apps for everything and to even use basic stuff like imap? but yeah i don't know their setup exactly.

[–] activistPnk@slrpnk.net 1 points 6 hours ago

PM’s apps perform the encryption on your own device because it’s your device that runs the apps. That is e2ee, but still only in the two scenarios I mention and even then it’s also vulnerable to targeted attack. PM could ship malcious j/s if it wanted (the likely case being to comply with a court order). It’s better if your own non-j/s FOSS MUA handles the crypto, which is actually easier if you don’t use PM.

If mailbox.org works the way anonaddy works, then that’s not e2ee. The msg payload is seen by the server that does the encryption, in the very least. The sender’s ESP would have already seen the msg.

[–] Gobbel2000@programming.dev 1 points 3 days ago

Yeah, that's kind of what I thought, and if dynamic DNS is a problem then that already rules out self-hosting for me.

[–] the_crotch@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

you would definitely want a static IP (as opposed to updating DNS entries all the time)

Also any IP from a dynamic range is going to make spam filters lose their shit

[–] activistPnk@slrpnk.net 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

True, but sending from a static IP that is linked to you yields less privacy. I’ve decided: fuck these email recipients who demand I compromise privacy in order to give them the convenience of relying on IP reputation. Sure, google and MS servers refuse email from me, but I prefer that anyway. I use postal mail for such recipients (and yes, that’s most recipients).

[–] the_crotch@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I get where you're coming from but nowadays a dynamic public IP is 'dynamic' in that it can change but rarely if ever will unless you switch ISPs or equipment.

[–] activistPnk@slrpnk.net 1 points 2 days ago

Indeed, which is more reason to not blindly block dynamic IPs.