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?
I’ve been using my own domain pointed at Inbox.eu. They’re based in the EU and I haven’t had any problems, I pay for 2 users, the price is something like 12€ per user per year, so it’s cheap enough for me.
I use Addy.io with my own domain. The reason is that I don’t want to depend on Addyio.
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.
If you mean self-hosting email, then good luck.
It’s a lottery with the IP and even the IP space you get, whether anyone will actually receive your emails.
I hosted my own for a few years, but god fed up telling everyone to dig through their junk folder for my emails, and not being responded to very often, probably because of just that.
Maybe some providers have it better, but I tried a few and each was just not good. I really think Microsoft, Amazon, Google and other big players have intentionally separated the good, trusted IPs, ones they use for email services specifically, and made the other worse
Get your own domain. Don’t host your own.
I’ve had the same domain on gmail, proton and now purelymail.
You can point your domain on any hoster like mailbox.org. There are a lot of benefits at not hosting your own mailserver.
A major downside is that email is not encrypted and Email usually contains very sensitive personal information.
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.
What benefits do you get from selfhosting?
One is that I can keep family email (everyone on the server) in the same ecosystem, so private information send between family members isn’t as likely to leak.
Another is also privacy – my mail isn’t being used to build a profile about me.
I also like the control and the ability to look at logs. If I don’t get an email, I can look at the server and figure out why it didn’t show up. It just provides more information for me.
