I’ve recently been trying to degoogle myself, and in doing so I’m going to need another email. I tried ProtonMail, but apparently only business accounts can use SMTP, even though their features claim SMTP access. I’m plenty fine paying for the service, but going from the $6/month to $12/month just to get notification emails from my server doesn’t seem worth it to me. I’ve not looked into what all else comes with Proton’s Business features, but i’m not really running a business or trying to start one up.
What do you use? do you like it? How’s the cost/features?
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Email is the one thing I don’t bother self hosting.
You need to use an existing host with reputation or most of your emails will end up in junk or be outright blocked.
I used to run my own email for years. Started on qmail, postfix+dovecot. Anti-spam (spamassassin for a while, rspamd), spf+dkim+dmarc, srs, arc-signing for forwards. All kinds of other tools, even wrote some of my own. I’ve learned a lot and pretty much ran the gamut to be honest.
So all that said, nowadays I just host with mxroute. Bought a lifetime plan. There’s features it doesn’t have but it’s good enough to get emails and a lot easier than self hosting.
I generally recommend finding a host that has the features you want at a price that seems fair. Email is the kind of thing that needs to just always work.
Once you set it up sure, it’s rock solid. Until one day you realize your emails are getting dropped and there’s some new thing you’ve gotta look into. Let somebody else handle it.
I was under the impression Proton Bridge was available for any paid subscription. I’ve had a Visionary plan for years, so I can’t say for certain since I get a lot of perks as a result.
The bridge is a bit tetchy, sometimes it works, sometimes it don’t, and can never really say why. You also need to have the bridge app installed on the machine you’re using it on (eg won’t work on mobile or any unsupported platform). The tl;dr for this is if you need to rely on SMTP / IMAP ProtonMail isn’t ideal.
I do actually have Proton Bridge running on my Yunohost machine, the CLI version was annoying to set up but that is the only install I haven’t had too much issue with (yet). The thing to be aware with that Proton is super anal about the email address you’re sending from, if it isn’t an alias (or a hosted domain) on the account it isn’t going to have any of that.
In terms of self-hosting though, I have a Wildduck install running. The software isn’t really production ready, but for a personal home server does the job super well. You can also get it to auto-encrypt incoming emails with PGP (similar to Proton) and it saves emails you send via SMTP to your Sent item folder automatically.
My advice for self-hosting though, is use a SMTP Smarthost from a professional provider (I’ve always used Duocircle and Spamhero), Google and Microsoft make self-hosting a nightmare even if you are fully compliant, but these operators give you a better chance of getting through.
Because I’m lazy, I also use MXGuardDog to filter incoming email, I rack up free credits by placing a link on my website so I’ve never once paid for the service in cold hard cash. But realistically you could skip this part.
Proton has stopped the “visionary” that allows SMTP, now it’s only available in business accounts. :( I tried setting up the bridge CLI, but so far haven’t been able to get it to send anything after logging in and syncing the account, Maybe I’ll try again once I’ve got some things off my plate.
That’s really weird “Proton Mail Bridge is currently available for paid subscribers. Upgrade your account” and on the pricing page it has “Email client support (via IMAP/SMTP)” starting on the Mail Plus plan.
Although I’ve got the same problem with Bridge on MacOS it just stopped doing anything for no particular reason, it’ll be worth contacting support to find out why (they’re still working on mine)
I use my domain name with iCloud+ mail. I self hosted the domain for almost a decade and it’s just easier paying for hosting. I have done it on both O365 and Gmail but they have both nerfed the ability to use custom domains so iCloud it is.
I was using smtp2go, I’m now testing purelymail for my personal email needs. I don’t think the latter is ideal for sending a large number of emails.
Fastmail.
But, it’s not the cheapest. $5 a month gets what you need though.
Really quick WebUI, great features, including hosting your own domains and smtp rewriting.
Very smart helpful support team.
Great for degoogling.
Mailcow dockerised is a solid option. It also has a really nice built in DNS checker which was very useful for getting that set up right.
I self host through my ISP connection.
- sendmail
- bogofilter
- bogofilter-milter
- opendkim
- Cyrus for POP3/IMAP
- roundcube
I have static IP and needed to get a business plan to obtain it. I am actually wondering if there’s place where I can set up a tunnel (that would work with freebsd) and then I could use cheaper, customer based plan.
My problem is to get something that wasn’t abused by spammers. I don’t plan to send any advertising, it would be low volume, since it is just for my and my family.
Is a Dynamic DNS not an option for you? Most residential plans keep their IP for months if not years, only really changing if the model drops for long periods of time.
Well there’s small chance someone else could get your mail, also there’s a reputation of given IP + there are blacklists that list dynamic IP ranges and some servers outright block them. And last one, you can’t set your own reverse DNS, which could increase like hood ending up in spam folder.
