Mail is something I don't want to touch. I use mailbox which is hosted in germany for some years now. For calendar & contacts I use the built-in Nextcloud apps, they also work pretty well

Edit: I self-host Nextcloud, so contacts & calender are on my private server

I've self-hosted email for over 20 years but I'm now moving to Fastmail for two reasons: (1) succession, I'm the only one in my house that understands how it works, and (2) email is never fully under your control and the large providers may decide to filter/drop email from your domain. But this is self-hosted, and I did enjoy my years doing it, so go for it if you want. I had good luck with OpenBSD/OpenSMTPD/Dovecot stack. Good luck!

Edit: I forgot to mention you can do a hybrid approach; handle receiving yourself and use a service like smtp2go.com to do delivery.

I host my email, just not at home but on a rented server.

Here I documented it all https://wiki.gardiol.org/4-e-mail-hosting

It works, its been working for decades now. Never had significant issues....

Email is quite resilient. Servers keep trying to send again and again messages for hours before they give up... So a backup server is not even really required.

If incoming emails bounce, normal email servers will see that and retry later. Not that I personally deal with email- I outsource it to Disroot.org :)

My domain's mail is hosted at https://purelymail.com/ $10/year. They seem to run on AWS hardware, so it's not free of US big tech. It's dirt cheap, but I've never had any problems, either receiving or sending. They have very clear instructions for getting your domain's mail set up.

Self-hosting email is like making your own butter.

It’s possible, but most people don’t want to take it on themselves.

Calendar and contacts I’d argue are good candidates to self host. If a config is off and you can’t access them for a day or two, does it matter?

But if email is down, you risk missing something important. If you have a trust issue and everything you send is getting flagged as spam? Hard and slow to fix.

If the problem you’re trying to solve is Flaky and Unethical Big Tech, I would look at finding another, smaller provider and paying for it. Rolling it yourself is a great way to learn entirely too much about mail servers and spending way too much of your free time on it.

I have run my own mail server for 20+ years. I set up everything correctly, including DKIM and DMARC. I have had the same IPs for 10 years. I send <100 emails a month. A few years ago Google started putting most of my emails in spam, and Microsoft started silently deleting them. They will not fix it. I had to start paying for a relay for outgoing messages.

Use migadu.com.

Email/calendar/contacts on EU server: posteo.de

They support IMAP and DAV

I repeatedly see people saying "don't host your own mailserver". So what are we supposed to do? Just give up and let megacorps own all of our mail? I get it, it goes to those servers anyways. F-that. I'm not giving up yet another service to them. Personally, I have a VPS with racknerd and use docker mail server. Been using it for a couple years now and no issues so far. Just make sure your DKIM/SPF records are good.

One thing you should know, the SMTP protocol is designed to work with intermittent network connections like modem, each email has several days of grace period, with many retries, so you don't need 99.999% uptime.

Best I can figure, choose a company that has well established general hosting services and get email through them.

It's going ro be really interesting to see if Thunderbird is able to make a good alternative. I really like the direction they are going, but time will tell if is sustainable for them and users alike.

Personally, I'm using Hostinger, which is reasonable and reliable.

Some people are relying on specialty private email providers like Proton or Tuta, but I have a big dose of skepticism. Lots of people are canceling their Proton subscriptions, and Tuta depends on using their clients because of the secure way it's built.

I would not be interested in attempting to self-host email. The service itself is trivial for an experienced network person (which I'm not), but the big picture is impossibly complex. There is a complicated and somewhat opaque reputation system that will arbitrarily block a lot of self-hosted email services. Some people have found ways to make it work, but it always seems pretty tenuous to me.

As far as email archiving, I highly recommend self-hosted Bichon, which I have run for a while and love it. I keep a few months of email locally, and the rest is on my server backup. It's straightforward to setup and use, fast searches, easy automations, etc.

As others have said, radicale is excellent for hosting calendar and contacts through CalDAV and CardDAV. I've used it exclusively for a while and never had an issue. The formats are pretty standard, so you more or less get your choice of client on any system.

Iirc hosting your own mailboxes is easy. Making sure others can actually get your sent emails is a pain in the arse. It's a cartel.

I self-host a metric fuck tonne of services and (with my extensive email background) I choose to outsource my email services.

You CAN do it today. But should you? Given DMARC, SPF, etc... No.

Since I left Gmail's free GAFYD feature, I moved to Fastmail (Australian) years ago. Does it cost money? Yes. Does it do everything I want? Yes. Does it have features Google would never provide? Yes.

Do I have any reservations or regrets? No.

Receiving email isn't too bad. Get a domain, set up dovecot and postfix, maybe a web frontend if you care. They're in basically every distribution's repos. I'm sure there's a mess of containers for it too, if that's your thing. Just have to make sure your ISP doesn't block port 25.

Sending email, however, is a different beast. You need to have a stable, clean, IP address. Then setup all the extra stuff on top (DKIM, SPF, etc.)

Your dynamic IP from your home ISP isn't going to cut it. If you can get a static IP, it might work, otherwise you need a tunnel or to host everything in the cloud, somewhat defeating the point.

Once you have a stable IP, and have the proper DNS records/certs set up, you begin the battle of getting your IP allowlisted. If you're lucky, the IP will be clean-ish and not flagged. If it's flagged, you're basically screwed and need to get another IP. Then you have to test sending email to all the big providers and contact the ones that don't allow your messages through. It's a long process. It's possible, but tedious.

I ran my own mail server for three years. It was fun, but also a lot.

Not selfhosted but I've been a happy MxRoute user for a few years.

I picked mailbox.org, configured it once and havent thought much about it since then, almost 2 years ago now

This post was a great reminder, i should probably reup my subscription soon..

I host my email on a hetzner VPS using dovecot+postfix and thus far no issues.

I don't really understand why people are so against it, for me it took an evening to set up and haven't touched its configuration since.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

[Thread #167 for this comm, first seen 12th Nov 2026, 22:40] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Thank you for posting this as I was not being able to access my work email was some internal issue. I would never have know as I cannot receive an update email!

1. Get cheap Hetzner VPS with redundant volume.
2. Get a domain name.
3. Run Stalwart for you mail server.
4. Run Bulwark for your inbox web app.
5. Run Kanidm for an identity provider.
6. Configure these DNS records: MX, SPF, DKIM and DMARC

There are more details, but those are the basics.

Email's not nearly as hard to host as people make it out to be. It is intimidating, yes, and there are a few very specific gotchas that make it infeasible or impractical from most if not all home internet connections, but if you're willing to outsource just a little bit on that one particular point so that you have a static, commercial-grade IP address somewhere that you can get reverse DNS and open up SMTP ports on, the rest of it is mostly just fighting with your usual, standard self-hosting struggles of getting it configured and working at all, then making sure it's secure and stays secure, and making sure your data is protected. The setup might be slightly more advanced than some other services just due to the number of moving parts, but it's not fundamentally any different than a webserver. There are some other issues that might crop up a little later in the game, managing your mail server's reputation for not sending spam (especially if, at some point, someone DOES get access and starts sending spam, you need to figure out how to recover your reputation). But overall it's manageable, I've been self-hosting my email for like 30 years. It sucks, but it's worth it.

I host a mailcow instance. Had some issues getting the IP address the VPS assigned me removed from some blacklists, and some companies whitelist email domains and only let you get their emails if you use outlook, gmail, etc., but those are few. Unfortunately it's often medical stuff that thinks they're being "secure" by only sending mail to systems that steal your private data for profit, but not much you can do. And that happens with any email software if you use your own domain as your email address.

I don't think they're European, but I pay NameCheap for email service. Local clients access via IMAP.

Spam filtering is mostly done via Thunderbird on my laptop.

Calander and contacts I do though Nextcloud.

TLDR: "How do you self-host email" – that's the thing, I don't. I don't host email sending and receiving myself, just the archive.

Here's a starting point for EU-based providers. If you give more details about your needs (how many mailboxes etc.) we can advise or recommend.

My main criteria is access through regular IMAP/SMTP without any made-up hurdles (cough Proton "email bridge").

Based on your need for email + calendar + contacts I'd say mailbox.org is a likely candidate. Please note that you pay separately for each mailbox (distinct login) but you can establish a "family" relation between accounts for sharing data.

What I do personally:

• Self-host a CalDAV/CardDAV server (Radicale) for calendar/contacts.
• Use a regular email provider (Migadu) with my own custom domains.
• I access the live mailboxes via IMAP from various email clients (desktop, phone etc.)
• Same for sending, use the provider's SMTP.
• I use mbsync aka isync to fetch a copy of all email to my server and delete messages older than 30 days from the live mailboxes.
• I self-host a private IMAP server and webmail mainly for browsing and searching this mail archive. I don't send from this webmail (although I could connect it to the live SMTP if I ever wanted).

If I ever need to switch providers I can do it as fast as I can sign up / pay with someone else and all it takes is updating the IMAP/SMTP server address on the various clients, and the DNS records for my email domains. Nothing else changes about the setup.

Why Migadu: they have a pricing model where you pay for storage and emails sent/received but can otherwise have unlimited domains, aliases, mailboxes, logins etc. It can become price-efficient very rapidly if you use it for 2+ people and/or have multiple email domains because this is exactly where regular providers corner you – they tax per mailbox, per domain, if you want more than a handful of aliases etc.

Do not fully self-host your mail. It'll be constant trouble. Large providers like Google and Microsoft are notorious for blocking them, or never even accepting mail from them in the first place. You can get it unblocked in theory, I hope you like whack-a-mole. Ironically often by eMail.

What you can do is just buy a hosted mailbox (small or no storage), and have a server at home that instantly collected everything (IMAP). It also basically just proxies outgoing mail to them (SMTP). In practice you host and control your mail, without the peering-issues.

I (not EU) self host my email on a vultr VPS. I use the classic dovecot + postfix setup, IMAP for clients, spamd (spamassassin) for extra filtering, etc., etc.. I've got SPF+DKIM+DMARC, a couple different domains, the whole nine yards, just for hobbying that's grown over the years for family members.

All that said, unless you're pretty dang familiar with all those things, I personally would agree with the several people who have just pointed to smaller-time email providers that support custom domain names. It gives you the control to pull it back to your own server later if you want to take on that endeavor (via simply DNS updates), but means you don't have to worry about the complex bits now. I would definitely not recommend hosting it in your own home - not because of availability issues or anything like that (as others mentioned, legitimate email providers retry by policy, so you don't need quad-nine uptime), but because most residential IPs, at least by default, are going to get blocked by most providers for being on a common policy blocklist - that is, your ISP likely tells e.g. spamhaus that your IP is residential and shouldn't be sending email. If you have a business internet plan, that changes. And I could also be wrong for UK; I've just got US knowledge on that particular bit.

If you're familiar with all the bits of SPF, DKIM, and DMARC and want to go for it, a VPS would be my recommendation. Note: many block outbound to port 25 by default to prevent spam bots abusing their IPs, so you'll need to keep that in consideration. Otherwise, one of the email providers mentioned is probably a good bet.

I self-host it with https://gitlab.com/simple-nixos-mailserver/nixos-mailserver.

• I had to set it up with all these SPF and DKIM and DMARC stuff. Wasn't too hard, just follow the guide. Test with GMail - the message details view says exactly what you have, what you haven't, and what's wrong.
• Every now and then I have to jump through some hoops to get my IP allowlisted in some weird provider or antispam system.

Email is a very old protocol, it originates from the time when computers were connected only occasionally. It is very much possible to come an agreement to power up the antennas at something o'clock every day to exchange emails, and the rest of the time they just sit in the queue.

Practically speaking, if your home lab is down for something like 12h, it should not impact email delivery much at all - the sending servers would just keep retrying. Usually for 48h. From https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5321#section-4.5.4.1

mail that cannot be transmitted immediately MUST be queued and periodically retried by the sender.

The sender MUST delay retrying a particular destination after one attempt has failed.

Retries continue until the message is transmitted or the sender gives up; the give-up time generally needs to be at least 4-5 days.

Microsoft documents this: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/defender-office-365/mail-flow-about#mail-flow-delivery-faq

Deferred messages remain in our queues for one day.

I guess technically they're RFC-compliant, but 1 day is not as much as I'd like...

I solved it with mailcow dockerized and an LT2P service for a non residential static IP. Works great, regular updates & patches and super reliable.

You can set up a fallback using their supplied script to make a cold backup in the cloud if you need to, but I've never had to bother. I also use another of their scripts to properly dump the db and files to my NAS and then I use borg to copy all the things to Hetzner.

I run Maddy on a VPS. It's pretty much trouble-free.

I ended up just paying for a private host. Now's the time of year to find one, with all of the Black Friday/Cyber Monday promotions taking place.

I use Zoho Mail with my own domain for really important stuff, like invoices and such, and my own Postfix + Dovecot + Roundcube (with multiple domains) for everything non-essential

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.

I know the feeling. I've self-hosted my email for a number of years. I'm currently migrating it to a new server and there are many living parts. I would use something like Docker since that's easie rto migrate or upgrade. But the VPS I'm using barely has any RAM.

I'm using Purelymail with my own domain for email hosting. It's been working very well for me. It supports CalDAV and CardDAV for calendar and contacts. It's US based though.

I would recommend paying for an email hosting service. As long as you use your own domain, you can switch email providers and keep your email addresses. If you have a static IPv4 address, you can host your own inbound email and just use the hosting service for outbound.

I run mailcow on a vps on a smaller, reputable, European host. I started out with Hetzner but there I had problems with delivery due to a bad neighbourhood. It really helps with a host that cares and take abuse seriously.

After moving it's mostly been good. I don't have any issues with outgoing mail, all seems to land fine on both gmail/outlook etc. It's pretty low effort, just need to stay on top of upgrades since there are internet exposed services.

Here is also a good post about best practice for smaller servers: https://bridge.grumpy-troll.org/2020/07/small-mailserver-bcp/

I have a filter that encrypts all incoming mail with my pgp public key, for added security (this is not bullet proof as it has to sit after rspamd but should make it harder to read any mails in case of any kinds of breaches).

Mail is a piece of software I won't bother self-hosting. I already tried, put in it a lot of time, trying to get my IP address considered safe because it was banned 15 years before I had it, to only have a third of my mail sent successfully received. It is not worth the effort and I switched to proton and recently to infomaniak.

The fallback part is the hardest bit of what you're describing, because true active-active mail is a lot of work for one person. A simpler setup that gets you most of it:

• Run your main mail server at home like you planned, and put a second, identical one on a small cheap VPS as a warm standby. Point a second MX record at the VPS with a lower priority, so when your home server is unreachable, sending servers deliver there instead and the mail just waits for you.
• Sync the mailboxes between the two on a schedule (there are tools that do mailbox-to-mailbox sync over IMAP), or at least keep nightly backups of the mail data on the VPS so you can restore quickly. FYI, the standby doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to hold your mail untill you're back.
• For certs, use DNS-based validation for the mail hostnames so both servers can hold valid certs for the same names without fighting over HTTP validation. That way TLS works whichever box is answering.
• Send outbound through a relay with SPF, DKIM and DMARC set up for your domain, rather than directly from your home IP, which keeps deliverability sane.
• And honestly, keep calendar and contacts on a seperate lightweight server, so a mail outage doesn't take those down too. Mail servers retry delivery for days, so a short home outage rarely loses mail at all. The thing you're really protecting against is a long one, and the standby MX covers that.

Hosting in Aus, dovecot + postfix. It's been solid.

You don't want to host your own email.

I use a host and they have an email service. If I complain to them about my emails, their response is "do not use us as your primary source of emails".

If a webhost does not want to be responsible for your emails, you should not be in charge of your own emails.