Hi,
Am evaluating all options for self-hosting my own mailserver. I am probably looking to host it in GCP or AWS, as I don't want to worry about availability on a really small VM
Would really appreaciate any recommendations from the combined wisdom of this subreddit, on what the most ideal stack to self host would be and any tips to not make any silly security errors.
Would be nice to solve a couple main problems, the main one being, I have older backups in a few different formats, .pst, .olm and .mbox. I want to bring all of these together, in one mail account and have them searchable and syncable to devices.
Is there a mail server that can even import all these formats?
I know email clients can import but I've never imported into a server. I'm guessing I could import into a local client then sync to the server somehow?
Did have it so that these mailboxes were imported on one of my PCs in Thunderbird. Oh my god was that awful, the search is absolutely shocking and most of the time, when you need to find an old email you are not at home, sat by the desktop computer.
Am really looking for something with a somewhat decent Web mail interface, I use webmail alot right now. Doesn't have to be Gmail level smooth, but more than anything I just want search to be good. Fast, presented well and accurate/smart.
Came across AnonAddy Source Code which seems like such an amazing idea that I've never come across before, so would love to integrate that into the solution. If anyone is aware of incompatibility between this and certain self host servers would appreaciate the heads up
Not too sure about spam-filters and email AVs. I'm not too clued up on that, obviously I would like to avoid spam and that anonaddy thing might go a long way but if the mail server just has basic rules and sweep features that would be good enough.
Not too worried about the privacy / encryption focus I've seen on some self-hosted mailservers. Moving to my own mail server must be somewhat better than what ms/google are harvesting from me data wise at the moment. Even if it is in their cloud.
What is everyone's experience of these?:
Also is there any mileage in running the web mail client separately? Do they have better search and UX than any of the built in ones?
Thanks in advance
Thanks for this thread, I have exactly the same use-case, but I have not yet had the time to actually research too deep into it so I am unfortunately still relying on Google.
My partial conclusions:
- I've been using the AnonAddy approach for 20 years now with my own domain, like many others have. You do not actually need a full suite for this, just setup your incoming email on your domain with a wildcard, choose a unique email address for everything you sign up for, and that is it. Sidenote: You'll be amazed at the confused faces you get when "Joe Plumbing Co" requests your email address and you reply "joeplumbing@yourdomain.com".
- For outgoing mail, just use SMTP2GO on the free tier, it works fine and I've never had delivery problems. Ignore everyone that talks about IP reputation making it impossible to self-host, while it is true, there are several suppliers with a free tier or a very low cost that take care of this for you. I use it nowadays with Thunderbird because for some reason I was unable to properly use custom aliases with the Google SMTP server.
- For incoming mail, you will probably need a better plan than self-hosting. Your server needs to be up 24/7 or you will end up losing email, so it is probably better to have a cloud-based incoming server that holds it and forwards to your server when it actually becomes available. I'm still investigating this part but it would seem that Cloudflare Mail Routing should work.
I have not yet found what the best solution is to the self-hosted archival search problem, please share your findings!