4w ago

Email with own domain service but local?

I have to ask this. Is there a service where I could bring my own FQN like Notgoogle.com and then have them handle emails for me? But with a twist.. I want notgoogle.com to send and receive emails via that outside entity, but I want to send the emails from a self hosted server that maybe has mailcow or similar and I want that same server to receive the emails from the outside company. Ideally the outside company is basically just a relay from my IP to the outside world and vise versa. The outside company would basically hold the emails until my server checked and downloaded them. any advice on this. Hopefully with a useful step by step guide from somewhere in the webs?

34 comments

What's the point of hosting a local server in this case, instead of just using a mail client?
- maybe multiple mail clients are configured to connect to a local server in an office while that server is configured to outside world and also fetches each mail only once. changing of outisde world provider then does not make you reconfigure all mail clients, but only your central once.
  
  I would say something similar if not exactly.
  I'm just looking forward to de-googling my life before my kids are old enough to get Hooked on that shit themselves.
  My basic idea is that maybe I can't or shouldn't host my own email server. But 15gig limits with constant nagging to pay up, so gmail is not the answer. That gets old quick. I want to just download the files into a central device that my wife and I have access to. But that has been thus far technically obfuscated. I'm not sending thousands of emails per day, just a family level of correspondence.
  Ideally my wife and I would login thru our phones to send and receive emails from a common email space that only lives at home. The emails would be routed to the outside entity who would do the actual sending and receiving. I have some basic things that I'm starting to like...email aliases and having my own email domain.
  I currently have my own domain on cloud flare but they don't proxy email servers. So here I be. I want for example to use e-mail like this:
  Basic form: notgoogle.com
  Bob@notgoogle.com
  Stacked not google.com
  Alias:
  Costco.Bob@notgoogle.com
  One time use or specific use:
  Karenwantsmyemail@notgoogle.com
  I already tried serving my own server and all this was possible. But it was insecure in that you can easily go find my IP address and my real address. I don't want that, don't really mind if someone knows it, but I don't want to be spearphished. And so that's where my desires for a local server that not my wife and I can access and use like gmail but safely come from.
  Rant: In general, oh God! Are we fucking retarded? I have a 2 TB disk, I got high speed internet... A rando in China can call my phone but somehow I can't get a rando to send me email? There's something wrong with that picture. Or maybe I should do exactly what I do with my phone number... Not use it at all unless it's family. You can spoof phone numbers, voices and emails. Maybe I should setup a Lemmy instance instead and just use this as a form of communication. The only problems being that my computer sometimes goes down due to power failure or IP change or some other reason, and nobody else would want to use my server...like the kids school or the DMV etc. Anyhoo...

Sure! That's an SMTP Relay. A lot of folks jumped on the poopoo wagon. It's common wisdom in IT that you don't do your own email. There are good reasons for that, and you should know why that sentiment exists, however; if you're interested in running your own email: try it! Just don't put all of your eggs in one basket. Keep your third party service until you're quite sure you want to move it all in-house (after due diligence is satisfied and you've successfully completed at least a few months of testing and smtp reputation warming).
Email isn't complex. It's tough to get right at scale, a pain in the ass if it breaks, and not running afoul of spam filtering can be a challenge. It rarely makes sense for even a small business to roll their own email solution. For an individual approaching this investigatively it can make sense so long as you're (a.) interested in learning about it, (b.) find the benefits outweigh the risks, and (c.) that the result is worth the ongoing investment (time and labor to set up, secure, update, maintain, etc).
What'll get you in trouble regardless is being dependent on that in-house email but not making your solution robust enough to always fill its role. Say you host at home and your house burns down. How inconvenient is it that your self-hosted services burned with it? Can you recover quickly enough, while dealing with tragedy, that the loss of common utility doesn't make navigating your new reality much more difficult?
That's why it rarely makes sense for businesses. Email has become an essential gateway to other tooling and processes. It facilitates an incredible amount of our professional interactions. How many of your bills and bank statements and other important communication are delivered primarily by email? An unreliable email service is intolerable.
If you're going to do it make sure you're doing it right, respecting your future self's reliance on what present-you builds, and taking it slow while you learn (and document!) how all the pieces fit together. If you can check all of those boxes with a smile then good luck and godspeed says I.
- Derek, thanks for giving a great answer. Your answer was an actual answer rather than just saying don't.

I backed "Run your own Mail Server", its a good start but email hosting is tricky.
- It's even trickier when your ISP blocks your fucking email port. Thanks, Starlink.
- have you read it? i considered buying it a while ago but was unsure, quite high price for an ebook that you cannot glimpse into (like with real books at the store some time ago) i thought. Also i learned a "bit" about most of its topics myself long ago.
  tricky yes, but very learnable too.
  
  I get pretty much anything Michael Lucas writes. The information is always great and his writing style is fun to read.
  Important to note: it’s not a step-by-step guide to copy and paste and have a mail server running. It’s all about understand all the stuff that goes into it.

I would just get set up on MxRoute and use whatever selfhosted service you want to interact with it.
- if the goal is simply to 'de-google', then mxroute itself is enough. 3rd party. decent policies. good track record. reasonable price (especially their promos).
- i guess step by step was asked for on purpose, but i also don't know on what level ;-)
  @werefreeatlast@lemmy.world :
  i'ld suggest as step by step to start small and increase to what you want:
  register a new account for testing on a freemail service like gmail.com gmx.net , hotmail.com or another. as its just the first step, it does not matter if its google or not, but that you can send and receive emails through it via common protocols like smtp and pop3 and that it is 'not' your account you handle important mails with as data losses could occur during experimenting.
  make sure your freemailer account is configured to use smtp and pop3 for sending/receiving email by a mailclient rather than only through their webpage. some freemailers also need you to have a different password for using the mail client than for logging into their portal (which is good). validate with your mailclient that sending/receiving works with those credentials, and note protocols, port numbers, login mechs maybe discovered by your mailclient.
  setup your mailserver (mailcow if you like) and connect it to your freemailers account maybe first for sending via smtp (send one to your real mail account) then for receiving maybe via pop3, testing it by sending a mail from your real mail account to the freemailer one.
  search for a cheap (you are still experimenting, right?) email service where you can use your own domain with, set it up, they likely also have faqs how to do the dns of your domain right to use their MX server. according to https://www.techradar.com/news/best-email-provider NeoMail (https://neo.space/) seems a good choice. i'ld suggest that you get a separate domain for experimenting from a different company (i use name.com) so you are then more aware of how everything works together and also can change parts of it more easily later if needs change. domains are usually cheap like some bucks per year and domain services usually also provide simple ways to define some records like in this case the MX and spf records you need/want for emails to be send to that email service.
  once you have setup dns records and your mail providers account for sending/receiving mails to/from, try to connect your holy email cow to it and experiment with it. also sending from/to your real mail account, and let it run for a while, look into topics like dmarc and dkim, use spf, dmarc and spf online check tools to see if that setup works as you like. based on your experience you might have ideas then how to go on with it.
  spf,dkim and dmarc are good to prevent malicious parties from sending emails in your name to third parties. a mail server works good without that but it is a good practice and might prevent your domain (not your ip) from beeing blacklisted because of spam that you haven't sent but seems to originate from your domain and cannot be distinguished from your genuine emails only due to the lack of missing spf, dkim and dmarc records. spf and dmarc are dns only settings while dkim are crypto keys you create for signing outgoing emails and the public parts of them are published as dns records again so everyone can check that the signature really comes from your domain. i dont know if or how mailcow supports dkim, but it should be at least possible ;-)

For incoming mail, on your server run a mail retrieval agent like fetchmail to fetch mail from the externally hosted mailbox into a maildir on your server.
To serve that maildir to your clients, on your server run a mail delivery agent like the IMAP server Dovecot.
To accept outgoing mail from your clients, on your server run something like Postfix with a relayhost configured with the details of your externally hosted SMTP server.
There's nothing unusual or tricky about any of this arrangement.
- Okay! I see. I only need to have the IMAP and SMTP ports open to NGNIX and routed to the internal IP.

Email is the one thing I have stopped trying to do myself. It just has too many things that you absolutely need to keep updated. Have a look at Forward Email (https://forwardemail.net/en). They can hook up to pretty much any domain setup you already have, and do the heavy lifting for you.
- Yeah same here. I just want to catch the emails as one would from Thunderbird but be able to share one account with my wife but without having to rely on keeping our emails on their server... That's the current gmail problem, our emails are on there, they decide to train their AI or whatever with the emails and they just email you an opt out. I'm done with that. Worst is that you can't quickly delete nor save and backup anything.
  
  For backing up your email from gmail or any other provider, check out MailStore Home edition: https://www.mailstore.com/en/products/mailstore-home/ It will grab everything in the account and store it locally, and then allow you to push it back onto any other imap service when necessary. Great for migrating your email, and keeping a just-in-case backup.

That doesn't work. Spam has made it not possible, sorry. Pay someone else who has a trustworthy IP

Have you looked for providers that offer ETRN? Seems like that might fit your use case well.
I've hosted my own email for over a decade with very few issues. It's low ram and CPU usage so a very cheap VM (or a pair in different locations if you wanna be leet) can be a viable way to avoid the ISP related issues people have trying to host it at home. If you really want it all ending up at home you can do ETRN as mentioned and while TCP/25 is often blocked at home, the submission port (TCP/587) rarely is.
- Okay, so I could keep a rolling backup of the server and patch that issue that way.

hm, sounds like literally any regular webhosting service that also offers email (like every such service i know of) to me, then maybe used together with imap (or pop, if you wish), and if you want to connect servers with it to send mails, then "smarthost" or "sattelite system" should be the configuration you are looking for for your own MTA. to get received emails from that service most common is to use pop3 (still common because seemingly every service offers it for compatibility) but other protocols would be faster like immediate recieve using notify within imap, and there are other options too, but those depends on what that service offers like maybe sending your mails once received by them to your own server via smtp or by other protocols depending on what they implemented. i think there is no "twist" with that and -what i understand of what you want - is a quite common thing.
i for myself don't want 3rd parties to be able to directly read my emails so i run my own mail server as tiny rented VMs from providers while my real emailserver is my homeserver that uses these VMs as "smarthost" and also pulls emails from there immediately. my mailclients are configured to connect to those VMs butbthat connection is relayed through VPN to my homeserver. thus i think my setup is a bit like what you want but i host everything by myself and i don't use mailcow but it looks like i use the same software mailcow uses too. i guess you are mainly bound to what mailcow offers when limiting yourself to it ;-)

so, you want something like spamhero standard (in/out relay and spam filtering for one domain)?
(i don't use them, just the first one i found. i had used similar years ago, but just have email hosted at two of our providers now instead).

I would never handle email myself. I would instead use a provider, turn off all filters and set up a mail server locally that works via the provider.
That way I don't have to convince my ISP to set up a PTR for me, handle DMARC or SPF. Or care if my IP is blacklisted.

Big nope. It's not a technical hurdle, it's a viability problem. Just search on why you should never host your own SMTP service.
- They are not requesting for info on running their own SMTP service that interacts with the greater internet.
  Though even if they were, the difficulty is overstated. I've run my own for years.
- Yeah, and people ask about suicide on the Internet as well, but I would never help them.

34 comments