Gmail alternative: good idea to use personal domain+hosting?
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I know there are alternatives like proton mail, tutamail, mailbox.org, etc... But what would be the issue if I create an email using my personal domain, stored in my hosting.. maybe encryption? It seems that no-one even consider this option, but I am not sure why...
What would you suggest?
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there is a lot to hosting mail. Reading about it, like this book will educate you about all that’s involved. -
Owning a domain for yourself and having a provider send/receive email on your behalf is a common choice, and it has its own benefits such as being able to migrate to other providers easily. As long as you renew your domain properly, it should be fine. Though do note that only you would use that domain, so anyone would know it was you who sent that email.
Owning a domain for yourself AND handling email sending/receiving can be challenging because there's a chance your email gets filtered as spam, and the receiver doesn't get what you sent. It's also possible that your server goes down, and the email sent to you doesn't arrive properly, though the email server usually try to send again a number of times before giving up.
If you are confident about setting a server, I can personally recommend Mailcow. As long as you set up SPF, DKIM, DMARC, it should pass most spam filter including Gmail. If you don't want to deal with the potential headache, getting a provider to send/receive emails for you is a good choice too.
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So, giving that I am an "average user", do you think it would be bad to use my Bluehost unlimited storage? I have to pay that anyway, because I have couple of personal website there..
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grab a personal domain, setup smtp through proton then have your local mail client archive via imap
email is the only service i would never self-host directly.
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Or maybe there are better solutions for hosting as well....
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But why?
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Thanks for the clear explanation!!!
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When you say hosting do you mean yourself or a company?
If a company, I do this with Dreamhost. Email hosting comes with web hosting. I might as well.
It's been a while since I last looked but I haven't read anything about whether they read my mail or not. They definitely could though.
Also their email spam filters are not very good.
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email is incredibly complicated to host yourself successfully due to security, dns requirements. i have a pretty good handle on how to do it, but i havent since ~ 2015 because of the constant upkeep and challenges from the email ecosystem at large.
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Do you have Bluehost web hosting plan? In that case, Bluehost would do the most heavy lifting regarding the derliverability. Email deliverability with big hosts like that shouldn't be a problem.
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If you are willing to study the subject and become advanced at it, go for it. Otherwise, use an existing mail service, possibly with your own domain, but stay away from the mail protocols and requirements.
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You can point your domain on any hoster like mailbox.org. There are a lot of benefits at not hosting your own mailserver.
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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.
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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.
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I hosted my own for a while. We could never send to gmail though and they are saddly too important.
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Which 5%
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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.
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German hoster united internet. The few people I know with those addresses receive a signal message.
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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.
