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How do you solve email? (fedia.io)
submitted 1 day ago by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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This Microsoft outage being the last drop in the bucket, I'm looking to get my email/calendar/contacts somewhere under my control.

As I already self-host a number of things (e.g. my Linux ISO collection), and have services exposed to the internet, it would make sense to run it at home.

After all, it's not heavy lifting. It's not hosting 500+ mailboxes for 100+ people. It's just little old me, with a handful of domains, catch-all receiving and a few dedicated sending addresses.

However email is a bit more mission critical than my smarthome control or self hosted LLMs. Downtime could be critically bad, and I still don't trust my home setup to be truly 99.999999% available.

I don't mind paying for a service but if I do I'd prefer something European, given I'm based in the UK (and otherwise am an EU citizen).

I'm really curious how y'all solve it. I guess I'm interested in some kind of hybrid solution where there's my own server and a hosted service, latter which acts as a backup solution, but still fully synced, so if my internet or power goes out (or my server goes down), I can still get mail sent and delivered.

So I'm not only just interested in the stack you run for email but the entire infrastructure, especially if you've solved this sort of off-site fallback service.

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[–] 1 point 20 hours ago (2 children)

What all is down from Microslop?

For Calendar/Contacts I use baikal. I thought about hosting my own email because my host really had me over the coals for what I was doing with it, I started researching and thought it could be fun. I bought a throwaway domain and had one of my static IPs setup for the port 25 being opened up I spent a week trying to do things, most of the Lemmy posts I found and most of the personal things like blogs I was looking for said do not self host your own email.

My previous host was HostHero, they did not have a wildcard email function so I needed to buy the unlimited email package because I do not use the same email address or password for anything. My new host, easyDNS, does offer a wildcard option so I can have unlimitted email addresses.

Why do I use a a different email address for everything? I can just close an account once I no longer use the service or once they start getting spammy, I get next to no spam.

I am not a EU citizen, I am Canadian! So when Trump came in and did his whole 51st state BS I jumped on the boycott Amarica train fast so the Apple services I was paying for stopped, one of which was hide my email so I got Proton, I found out the CEO was a simp for Trump so I was going to host my own and as I said I discovered it is not a simple thing even if I was going to do just one email address.

But I strongly do suggest find a host in the EU, that offers a wildcard option. All though it sounds like you have a good handle on things email is something else.

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  • [–] 2 points 14 hours ago (1 child)

    Why do I use a a different email address for everything? I can just close an account once I no longer use the service or once they start getting spammy, I get next to no spam.

    This is really useful and I do this too with the service / product name as the "name" (ie microsoft-mail@mydomain.tla)

    It's interesting to see how emails are sold / transferred over time...

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  • [–] 1 point 5 hours ago

    I have a formula (service name)-(local slang)(three random numbers)@mydomain.ca that way I can use free trials if I still need the service (I have only done this 2 or 3 times, not saying that I wont do it again but hey when in Rome) it also allows me to have multiple accounts with the same service for different purposes.

    If I use a service than stop, forget about it. The email is almost definitely going to be sold so when I get spam I will close the address, if I stumble upon the service again and think oh cool I should try this vaultwarden via bitwarden may say here are your sign in credentials I will try signing in and it will tell me this account is no longer active so I need to create a new one.

    My orignal plan was (service name)@mydomain.ca but than I came across the wanting extended free trial so I thought (service name)2@mydomain.ca, some are fine with that some are not. I like throwing in the fluf just to keep bots off of my trails.

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