Gmail alternative: good idea to use personal domain+hosting?
-
To give some context, the special edition of that book has a different title that hints at how very challenging it is to get it right when you host your own server.
Typically, it’s much better to own a domain and pair it with FastMail or other reputable email provider.
-
I managed to get my mails through 95% of servers I've tried, and after evaluating the 5% that didn't accept my mail, I just realized they can suck my man-tits. But maybe those 5% in your case might be recipients you value.
-
I hosted my own for a while. We could never send to gmail though and they are saddly too important.
-
Which 5%
-
That worked like a charm for me, but some strange German mall hoster demanded the blood of an unborn unicorn or something like that for it to work.
-
German hoster united internet. The few people I know with those addresses receive a signal message.
-
I've done this for years.
One of the benefits is that you can always just set up Gmail to pull from Pop and send with SMTP anytime if you're not ready to give up Gmail yet and then just turn it off when you are without the need to announce a change in email.
-
I only dipped my toes into email hosting at a (terrible) job, the effort and complaints when things didn’t send/receive properly was too much.
That being said, personally I’ve used Gmail and I’m ready to get rid of it. I’ve got a domain I’d like to start using.
What’s everyone’s preference for provider? (I’m avoiding Proton Mail due to the CEO’s recent controversy)
-
I moved over to fastmail and have been enjoying it, but I'm sure there are plenty of people who will tell me why it was the wrong choice.
-
I bought a domain name and got a web host. I set the index page to be blank and only use the web host for email. It works well. I still have gmail but try to move everything to my own domain email.
-
Get your own domain. Don't host your own.
I've had the same domain on gmail, proton and now purelymail.
-
Running a mail infrastructure properly is a complex problem. I would not recommend it for most people. There's a reason most companies outsource it these days.
-
But why support the Nazi sympathizer?
-
completely debatable if you dig into it, which i have.
-
I’ve been happy with Fastmail.
The cost isn’t too bad at $5/mo per user.
The wildcard email thing is cool. You can use addresses like [email protected] to hand out to companies on the fly.
I may go back to hosting my own, but I have no complaints with Fastmail at all.
-
Do enlighten us all.
-
I've been using my own cloud-hosted SMTP relay and Zimbra server for over a decade now, and I love it.
There can be a bit of a learning curve, and in some cases sites won't accept mail from cloud-hosted domains. I add those domains to a rule in sendmail that sends those domains through Amazon SES, and then they get accepted.
If you do go this route, just make sure that your recovery emails or 2FA for things like your registrar go somewhere else. If your cloud provider pulls the plug on you or something you don't want to be stuck waiting for an email that can't arrive.
I love the level of control that I have over my email and wouldn't have it any other way.
tl;dr: steep learning curve, but worth it in the long run. Keep gmail as a recovery/2FA account or something, though.
-
Depends on your use case. I went with using a custom domain with my iCloud mail account. This lets me accept all messages sent to my custom domain.
So when I create accounts I just use that as the email address like this: [email protected], [email protected], etc.
They all go to one mailbox but that’s all I need anyway. I’ve been happy with it.
-
Rolling your own email is a pain. That said, I use a VPS and host my own server with domain name and site for $5/month. Setting it up was a pain, but once you get all the records right so you're not considered spam, it works really well. That said, I haven't done anything with webmail; I strictly use IMAP and SMTP.
-
Hi. I used to run a mail server around ten years ago and started running it again last year.
I have three receive mail domains and one mail domain that does both. It is /so/ much harder now.
- One domain that I let lapse for a few years is currently being impersonated by various servers.
- There are periodic and frequent attempts to login via compromised credentials
- Domain and IP reputation is a thing now.
The first challenge is to find a server that will let you host email but that isn’t on a spam list. Some spam lists you can apply to get off, some you can’t.
Then you have Microsoft. With Google you get thrown into spam. With Microsoft, your email just doesn’t make it. Their support is non existent.
I switched servers three times and took another month to get to Microsoft hosted inboxes. And your email is useless without Microsoft due to all the businesses that use Microsoft as a mail provider
And then if you use the mail app on iOS you quickly discover that you have to manually refresh because just on iOS, the mail app doesn’t support imap push or whatever it’s called.
I still haven’t found a good SELF hosted solution. There are third parties you can use but I don’t want to do it. There used to be a few popular solutions but development went off and on so some distros dropped it.
I’m still on Google and Apple calendar because I haven’t found a solution for that.
Of course there are solutions that encompass it all, but I am running postfix and dovecot and finally got it stable so I’m not running mailcow or whatever…
-
T [email protected] shared this topic
