Best alternative to selfhosting email? E.g. email hosting provider for a custom domain

ProtonMail has been my go to, really fantastic service, you get simplelogin as well and can add custom domains up to 10 iirc. And the VPN is top tier too.

I used to self host email and got sick of my emails never getting through. Email is federated in theory, but pretty centralized in practice. Paying for Proton was definitely worth it.
- It really is depressingly hard to send email from most IPs these days. Somewhere along the lines we switched from black lists to white lists.
Someone shared this post about ProtonMail the other day and thought I should share here as well.

http://jfloren.net/b/2023/7/7/0
- An interesting read - thanks for sharing.
How good is spam detection on ProtonMail? Especially compared to some of the big players like GMail?

Edit: I moved my primary email address to ProtonMail. Spam-Filtering is simply not good. About 50% get through just fine, even if it's very easily identifiable as Spam / Phishing. I love everything else about ProtonMail but Spam-Filtering is simply not good despite relatively positive reviews I found about it.
- Permanently Deleted
I have Protonmail rolled together with AnonAddy and that gives me all the aliases I could ever want.

Permanently Deleted

I recommend fastmail.com though they do have done shortcomings that you need to consider such as the fact that they're based in Australia (five eyes country) and have servers in the USA. Their advantage is a slick interface, fantastic app based on JMAP, and just generally being super convenient. They allow catch all addresses, masked emails, custom domain etc. I find them super convenient.

Another upvote or seven for fastmail.com - I spent a little too much time spinning my personal domain hosting through Fastmail, Tutanota, Proton, mailbox.org... and then came back full circle to Fastmail.

Their shortcomings, if you're concerned about privacy, are listed right above^^^ but I don't think you can find a better email hosting provider for the pricing.
Email isn't that secure anyway (don't use email if your life or freedom depends on it), so I don't see that as much as a downside.

Proton and fastmail you can use custom domains. I only have experience using fastmail. They provide great instructions for the settings in cloudflare (mx records, etc). My domain is purchased through namecheap.

I can receive mail on *@mydomain.com and I can send email from any thing I want ad-hoc (anything@mydomain.com or anything@anything.mydomain.com)

I thought about selfhosting as well, but the internet concensus was it can be a hassle with your email getting rejected.

I've been very happy with mxroute for quite a few years now. They have a summer deal going on for $40 a year for unlimited domains and accounts, you're only limited by storage (100GB) and outgoing emails per hour.
t would be helpful to know what you consider basic features you want the host to support, but catchall works.

I self-host my main email account, but use MXRoute as an outbound relay. Works great.

I do have some email accounts that use MXRoute. The Crossbox webmail system they use is very good.
Same here, very happy about mxroute, they even have a plan where you pay once for lifetime account.
+1 for mxroute. Happy customer since last black Friday. No fuss and just works (after reading the how-to). Also spam detection is good.
How good is mxroute at blocking spam correctly?

Your exact use case will vary as to what is "best" - I went with Fastmail $50/yr USD) after my research a few years ago based on features I wanted. But also based on things other services didn't do.

Fastmail offers granular, per-app passwords -- I have a single password which has read-only access to IMAP in order to back up all the data on a timer. This feature is missing from many (many) other email providers - using the 80/20 rule, if they even offer it it's a single password with full access (Mailfence, for example)
Fast, reliable incoming instant delivery is needed. I have financial services which send 2FA style codes in email (the US Treasury website for example) and need to get those via a service which is top notch. I don't get to choose how to consume this content, it's email or nothing
Fastmail allows for many domains easily, with a very nice DNS checker wizard to help you set up your records as well a keep checking them to ensure they stay correct.
Fastmail supports not only your catchall, but quick and easy masked emails as well for one-time use. For example, when shutting down an account on some random site I don't want to keep spamming me, you generate a masked email, change the email on that remote account and usually get a verification email to click a link, then shut down that remote account, then delete the masked email. More than one service keeps spamming you after you shut down an account
Fastmail has a good spam catcher for me - it's polling my decades old GMail and even catches spam that the GMail side miss, so I'd say it's even one notch better than GMail at this.
Fastmail offers full CardDAV (contacts) and CalDAV (calendar) access, which makes plugging it into any other app that supports this very easy - their DNS wizard helps you set up the service records. I use "DavX5" on my Android to sync all Contacts and Calendar outside of using the Fastmail app (which is a self contained app on Android, it's not too bad)
Fastmail has a really, really cool and easy to use Notes feature built right in that actually works without hassle. In essence it's just an email folder where they manage HTML emails, but from a UI perspective on both the web app and mobile it's presented as a "Notes" tab. This has come in so handy when I need to take a quick note on my mobile of any sort for looking at on a laptop later, etc.
Proton and Tutanota are all about marketing their encryption and security, but the reality is most of my email interacts with the outside world and this doesn't have any bearing in real life use.
Proton doesn't have "real" IMAP, you have to run some custom bridge software on your own which is highly undesirable for me; Tuta doesn't offer any external client access of any sort. Basically, you're either using their apps or website or you're kinda out of luck

I also use Mailfence as a backup on a second domain, with the emails from Fastmail being synced over via IMAP (on both sides) on a timer into a subfolder, such that if one service goes down I have a second email route ready to use. Always have a backup plan, things break when you least expect it.

I already posted that I recommend fastmail elsewhere in this thread, but you raised so many good points that it reminded me of some extra points :)

Fastmail offers granular, per-app passwords – I have a single password which has read-only access to IMAP in order to back up all the data on a timer. This feature is missing from many (many) other email providers - using the 80/20 rule, if they even offer it it’s a single password with full access (Mailfence, for example)

Since this community is about selfhosting I think it's worth pointing out that this is AMAZING for selfhosting. I have all me selfhosted services sending e-mail via fastmail's SMTP. With per-app passwords I don't need to store my normal e-mail password and the apps can be limited to SMTP only (so no read access). And in case of compromise you can revoke permissions on a per-app granularity.

Fastmail offers full CardDAV (contacts) and CalDAV (calendar) access, which makes plugging it into any other app that supports this very easy - their DNS wizard helps you set up the service records. I use “DavX5” on my Android to sync all Contacts and Calendar outside of using the Fastmail app (which is a self contained app on Android, it’s not too bad)

Fastmail has become my contacts app now - it's really great to have all your e-mail and contacts in the same place. The contacts don't even need to have an e-mail address - I have a lot of contacts stored for whom I only have a phone number. I sync to android using the same DavX5 app and then immediately have these contacts in whatsapp and signal.

I have a couple domains that are very low volume for outgoing mail. I use Migadu. I'm happy with their cheapest tier ($19/year for both domains). They have catch-alls and many other nice features.

Edit: They have no hard limits on the number of addresses, users, or domains and such. They just want you to be reasonable. You choose a tier based on your average quantity of outgoing mails per day. Again, there are no hard limits; they won't cut you off unless you abuse the system.

Seconding Migadu! I’ve had them for about 3 years now and never had a problem.
I've been happy as well with migadu for the time I've been using it ~3 years. Have different mailboxes, and I used aliases for pretty much every website I sign up with.

I’ve just moved my email hosting from Fastmail to Migadu, very competitive pricing if you have a lot of users/mailboxes/domains but not that much email traffic

I’ve always had my eye on them, but the 20/out limit on the micro plan seems too small.
- I use migadu and am happy with them. I do wish they had another tier between $19 and $90.

I use Fastmail and it’s pretty reasonable, has some nice tie-ins with 1Password, alias emails, etc.

Mailbox.org is decent as well

Happy customer for years. However, they recently changed their price schemes. The cheapest plan (1 EUR monthly) no longer allowes custom domains, you need to pay more for that.
- Yeah, that sucked :(

Honestly any service that offers cPanel can allow mail hosting and a catchall.

If you just want a basic IMAP/SMTP service with nothing fancy I know these guys do allow catch all mailboxes https://hostinguk.net/email

Purelymail.com has been great for me for years. Insanely cheap and just works.

It's great, I just wish the admin UI was better somehow. Especially the routing page quickly gets out of hand.

ProtonMail for regular email + smtp2go for services to send outbound email.

You can use protonmail’s smtp gateway(tokenized) also if you have one of the larger plans
- Well shit, didn’t know that was a thing.
  
  So far my usage is enough to keep me on the free smtp2go plan. But that’s worth keeping in mind if my needs grow.

Proton mail offers catchall, assuming you mean what I think you do. Basically I can receive mail sent to anything@mydomain.com, though my account only has 5 named accounts that I can send from.

I use Proton mail and Anonaddy.

For 24$/year porkbun has been really easy!

Maddy

If it is just for email forwarding maybe a service like https://anonaddy.com/ or https://simplelogin.io would work. Catch-all is even included in the anonaddy free plan as that is something you actually do not want to have enabled 😄 For your custom domain you have to have the lite plan at least though.

Sorry I should have clarified that I'm not just looking to receive but also send emails from botj of the domains that I use.

Edit: do you mind clarifying why using catchall is a bad idea :)?
- They do allow to reply, simplelogin also has no limitation on reply count.

I've enjoyed runbox.com for years but don't think they offer catch-all, at least not when I last checked. You might look at mxroute.com, I heard about it later and might have gone with them first and they somehow seem more likely to support that

I've used runbox for I don't know how many years now. They do support a catch-all, as I make up email addresses on the fly with my domain and it works just fine.

Protonmail for actual hosting and Cloudflare for free catch-all forwarding.

I can highly recommend purelymail.com. They allow multiple domains, users and catch all accounts. They are great value, with a flat rate $10 per year ‘simple’ price, or you can pay per resource which for most people works out cheaper.

Been with them for over a year and been really good. Had a slight issue setting up one domain and their support were friendly, emailed back and sorted it out straight away for me.

I self host my imap Server that my clients access. I have a minutely cron job that first fetches, then deletes, the emails from my mail provider.

I don’t self host smtp.

With that I have all the advantages of self hosted email, but no integration problems.

I can't recommend Migadu enough. I'm on the $99/year plan and have dozens of domains and clients with their own domains too, it's easy to manage and does everything I need it to.

Whatever hosting service you're going to use, if you're not afraid of a little bit of Lua coding, consider using imapfilter -- it's a swiss knife for backups, pre-sorting, hooks and migration.

imapfilter is a (criminally underrated, IMO) tool for writing e-mail rules in Lua, which allow you to do tons of things, but my favorite is migrating e-mail, regardless of account.

See, unlike most filtering/sorting systems which are either completely proprietary or limited to single account (exportable as Sieve, if you're lucky), imapfilter does not care where each "end" of the rule is: you can write rule that migrates from account1/folder1 to account2/folder3.

This allows you to completely decouple any sorting, pre-processing, hook or backup system from the actual locations or providers you happen to be using, as well as it allows you to combine any number of locations in any simple or complex way you need. Whatever system you will end up creating will stay with you as long (as you can use IMAP locations), so you can really focus on making it work long-term and have it fit into the big picture.

I've been using it for almost 10 years and ever since it has changed my whole world of e-mail. I have constant set of rules that take e-mails from set of inboxes (each box for different purpose, each on different provider, for reasons) and sort them to folders on my "actual" account, where I get to read them on my terms. I also have several of rules that run custom scripts exporting CSV's, etc. (The rules are Lua programs, after all, so sky is the limit.) If I ever need to migrate my domain to another service (believe it or not, happened more than once in 10 years), all I need to do is set up the new account as base for the rules, but all of my rules are always going to be preserved.

In my past work I actually used imapfilter to move all IMAP from company Gmail to a locally maintained (on company laptop) Dovecot instance so that I could eventually use a sane client to get my work done. (And because the instance was local, I could access my e-mail offline with best possible speed.) One could do a similar thing with personal/freelance e-mail -- just run Dovecot somewhere at a trusted place (you won't be sending/receiving e-mails here, you will be only using IMAP to IMAP commands, so none of the horrors of self-hosting e-mail apply) and use imapfilter to route all email there, then back up your dovecot folder and you're all set.

Except for need of coding, the disadvantage is that, I need an independent machine that runs 24/7 in order to keep sorting the e-mail (I do it cron-based but you can also do it continually) but that has not been a problem for me as I'm the self-hosting-nerd that's going to have such machine anyway.

Again, perhaps with more clarity:

With imapfilter you can

choose where you will host your "actual" e-mail, let's say you choose according to best spam filter.

choose where you will store your e-mail long-term.

choose where you will access the e-mail for everyday use (this could be several separate accounts if you wanted to eg. use one on your phone and another one on your workstation)

choose where you will run imapfilter and any script hooks

start building your rules.

1-3 could be same provider or different providers, including your custom dovecot instance, you will simply choose based on convenience and limits. If you ever need to change one of the endpoints (providers), you just need to rewrite them in your ~/.imapfilter/config.lua. (And migrate, which can be done using imapfilter or manually using any sane client, eg. Claws Mail...)

I found mxroute, it works very well for me. I can't say much about specific features since I just wanted a simple email host.

I like and trust Proton Mail, and they support setting up custom domains while hosting your email data (for subscriber users).

You can then access it via their web mail box, via their Android and iOS apps, or via a desktop email client if you install their "bridge" application. The bridge application basically maintains the secure encryption ethos of their email system by ensuring all email traffic between your desktop and their servers remains encrypted, but can still be accessed via your preferred email clients such as Thunderbird or Outlook. The bridge is available for Windows, iOS and Linux.

I personally recommend Protonmail as it's primary focus is security and encryption, yet it does this in a very well developed and slick interface, so you get the best of both worlds. I'm a subscriber and moved from Gmail about 2 years ago as I wanted better privacy and security (they even have great tools for importing your old emails from major web providers). I don't have a custom domain but from my experiences of everything else they provide, I'd be confident it works as intended.

EDIT: In terms of cost, its €4 a month for the first tier which includes support for 1 custom domain, 10 email addresses, and 15GB of storage, or €10 for 500GB, 3 domains, 15 emails. They also include VPN, calendar, drive storage and a password manager in both.

Side question. Does anybody know of a decent service that basically works as a smarthost for outgoing and will MX incoming emails back to a mail server I host? I've been self hosting email since the '90s and just don't want all of my email stored elsewhere. The IP reputation chasing is just too much to deal with now.

You may like PurelyMail. I believe you can MX to an external server. I know they offer a free trial that may be worth giving a shot.
I played around with smtp2go and it felt like what you’re after.

I know how you feel though. I self-hosted mail for about 5 years with a VPS running OpenBSD. Eventually I looked at “outsourcing” SMTP to get around this crazy IP reputation stuff. But eventually I went with a fully hosted service Migadu.

It's not self hosted but I use Tutanota. I have my own domain anything that comes to that domain shows up in my box. It might be better than the alternatives because it's an encrypted mail service.

Check out PurelyMail. It's $10 a year, unlimited custom domains, unlimited emails, privacy focused.

I use free tier of Zoho Mail and it works well enough for me. Need to use their app though but it's not too bad (the cheapest tier has imap iirc)

Funny 😄 pretty much asked myself the same thing, the day before yesterday.

Specifically, I have been looking for encrypted mail hosters supporting your own domain. Also, hosting in Europe on dedicated Hardware (or at least guaranteed European VPS), GDPR compliance and some sort of certification/ verification of the said requirements and their claims!

What I came up with:

mailbox.org (never heard of it before, but pretty much has your requirements covered) <- Tor nodes, anonymous accounts(no personal data at all!)
proton mail
Tutanota (pretty young - but interesting concept)

I won’t cite their individual plans - that’s for you to figure out in detail.

The thing that bugs me with the Proton Mail and Tutanota, to effectively make use of their threat model/ encryption you have to use their Apps/ Software. EDIT: I’m currently using Microsoft365 - with it you are pretty much locked in - I fear with Proton or Tutanota it’s the same. Migrating is a pain.

I’m trying mailbox.org at the moment - they got a 30-free trail.

I've been using Tutanota. They are kind of similar in principles to Protonmail, but until recently were dirt cheap at €12/yr (now €36/yr). The only "drawback" is that you can only access your mail through their app, this is a feature, not a bug, according to Tutao.

I use Porkbun with Gmail and ForwardEmail.net. They do a great job.

As a single user or small household setup - I'm using Cloudflare email routing, with catchall, forwarded into my Gmail account for receive. For SMTP, I'm using a combination of mailjet.com and brevo.com, which both have fairly robust free tiers for personal/small business use and allow sending from anything@domain.com.

Microsoft365. It’s like $6/user/month and you get access to the whole MS suite (Word, Excel, etc.). Email is managed by Exchange Online. Crème de la crop as far as email goes.

If you’re in the Apple ecosystem and just want something barebones then you can use a custom domain with your iCloud account. I think it’s called iCloud+.

I am already paying for iCloud+ so I use their service with my domain. It gets the job done.
- Seconded, I have an iCloud+ family plan so it was a no-brainer to use their mail. Setup was easy and it supports catch-alls.
Microsoft is a privacy nightmare though.

uberspace might be what you are looking for. you get a fully maintained mail setup, 10GB of storage, a dozen preconfigured services, a nice wiki and a very cool team of nerds. starts at 5€/month and you can buy your own domain elsewhere (i use inwx).

What about Microsoft 365? The tenant itself is free and per account and month you pay about 5-10$ (depending on sibscription level).

With this you have the full MS Exchange experience, you get 1TB of OneDrive space and all the shebang.

I couldn't get it set up to allow each of my family members to have their own email address on the domain. It was basically the opposite of the "no catch all" feature other hosts seem to have - Outlook custom domain was 100% catch all to 1 account. I very quickly undid my partial setup and am back in Google for now.
If you care at all about privacy I wouldn't reccomned M365. Because: Schrems II and MS use your information for their own purpose, and in effect is not compliant with fx GDPR.