Unless you're planning on expanding in the future, I'd suggest opting for one of the big-name mail hosting services for a single account (Google, Microsoft, etc).
Beyond that, I'm a huge fan of mailcow.email - It's probably a bit more resource heavy than you're looking for, but it makes everything an absolute breeze to manage.
I used to maintain a mail stack (non-mailcow) for my own single account/domain uses and it eventually became too much of a chore for me to continue with.
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Edit: I see you're looking for hosting suggestions more specifically (I can't read) - On that front, any of the larger name VPS/Cloud server providers would likely meet your requirements at a reasonable cost.
Or just use a similar, FOSS email solution. https://mailcow.email/
Seriously, all the things that cloudron offers can be done with ease though plenty of other things, without limits and for free. It's a glorified apt wrapper.
Have a look at https://mailcow.email/
I have just started with it an its impressive.
I remember the pain with running it by myself.
But if you want to run a email server.
The hard part is not receiving and filtering... The hard part is to get emails out!
So a dedicated IP is needed. For a small installation a small VPS can do the trick.
Not really, I ordered a VPS at DigitalOcean checked if the IP is on any of the biggest blacklists and been using it since then. Gmail, Outlook, all the big ones accept the mail.
But I use https://mailcow.email/ instead of mail-in-a-box.
Turns any Ubuntu server into a fully functional mail server with one command.
- Mail server suite based on Dovecot, Postfix and other open source software, that provides a modern Web UI for administration.
Serverless? But you do have amazon email servers. Perhaps I do not understand term serverless correctly.
There is also a container option ... mailcow
This also does not have “server” 😊
Pseudo magic
I appreciate you want to learn it by yourself and no docker shizzle, so others here might help you much more.
If you ever change your mind and want a stack that is super-nice to maintain and easy to setup, I gladly present you mailcow :)
Oh sorry it's not self-hosted, it's a SaaS email service, not a software offering. I haven't run my own mail service in years, but I hear good things about mailcow and mail-in-a-box if you're brave enough to take it on.
I miss running my own e-mail servers (postfix, spamassasin, clamav), I did from the late 90s until somewhere between 2005-2010 but it's just such a time investment.
Zimbra, mailcow. Mailcow Is particularly cool as it packages many products in one (postfix, dovecot, rspamd, sogo for groupware, etc.). Dockerized, comes with an excellent GUI. I am not sure how the default setup scales, but for mid-sized enterprises it should hold up. And, being split in discrete containers per-component, it can probably scale as needed.
If you prefer docker, there is Mailcow. Free and easy to set up. Documentation is there, and if you don't want to set it up, you can use their managed mailcow instance for a fee and you support them. Update is fully automated as well with a script, just remember to go to ./update.sh every so often if needed. There is a full dashboard, and you can add other email clients if need be. Hope this helps
I would recommend that you start with one of the pre-packaged email solutions like iRedMail (which I use), Mail-In-A-Box, or MailCow. This will give you a email server that has been tested in production that you can study. Also, these packaged email servers will have a community of users who you can ask questions.
Am a huge fan of https://mailcow.email/
The built in spam protection so far has little to none issues with false-positives and vice versa. Tweaking so far was also pretty easy with their management interface.
I have hosted my family's personal email accounts for the last two years and it's a mixed thing. Software is the easy part really, I set up the VPS with a single command thanks to https://mailcow.email
Getting others to accept your mail is more difficult. If you're going to send from your ISP's dynamically assigned IP you will have a bad time.
I used a VPS in the cloud with fixed IPv4, reverse DNS, DKIM, SPF, DMARC and still Outlook would block me because another IP in the same block was sending spam and they blacklist the entire subnet.
Over the last couple of days I have been migrating emails from G-Suite over to a selfhosted Mailcow instance. https://mailcow.email/
As for photos, I'm using Nextcloud but may change to something more tailored towards photos in the future.
I'm a little worried about what's going to happen with all my google purchases - I have spent thousands over the years on various playstore apps/movies.
The Mailcow devs released a statement regarding Log4J: Since Solr is not publicly accessible, they say that Mailcow was/is not affected by the vulnerability: https://mailcow.email/2021/12/13/%e2%9a%a0%ef%b8%8f-important-informations-about-log4j-exploit-wichtige-informationen-uber-log4j-exploit-%e2%9a%a0%ef%b8%8f/
Mailcow may be what you're looking for. Open source, full featured (including ActiveSync), and they sell enterprise support packages too.
It doesn't support HA itself but maybe you could do that at the hypervisor level, or possibly do something with Kubernetes if you're feeling suitably clever!
Just run a mail server with IMAP access. Mail Cow is pretty simple to set up. Then setup a wildcard for the domain. Most of the reason people trash on hosting your own email is getting other domains to accept mail from you. If you're never sending, and only care slightly about reliability, an email server is pretty straight forward.
I do recommend a pre-made solution, given that managing all the components of a mailserver can be very time consuming (spf, dkim, spam, etc). My choice is mailcow https://mailcow.email. Free, dockerized, comes with rspamd, a powerful webgui, easy single command upgrades and sogo (webmail/calendar/contacts). Obviously based on open-source software. I've been running it for 3 years. Never a single issue, it's just fantastic.
If you go the build yourself route, I second the recommendations above (workaround.org). You'll learn a whole lot. That's the route I took before going mailcow. Christoph, the author, is a very competent and nice guy. He helped me with some questions at the time.
If you want to setup your own mailserver, I strongly encourage you to use mailcow. This is a docker container hosting all important services (from postfix over spam assassin up to webmail).
I used to run sll these services myself, however it's not to easy to understand all the different parts to receive emails and it's a lot harder to configure the server in a way it is not recognized as spam cannon (in that case you can send emails but most people won't receive them as their mailserver filters them out).
Mailcow provides all necessary tools to run a full featured mailserver and takes you by the hand to guide you through the configuration process.
If you don't aim to be a mail server professional, I would definitely use that.
Might be worth having a look at Mailcow, which packages all the mail components into a handy Docker package to make configuration more straightforward.
For VPN worth also have a look at WireGuard, which is very lightweight and ideal for leaving it as an "always connected" option that routes just your mail traffic over it.
Respectfully disagree. I run my own email server at home with mailcow without any problems. The trick is just to get an IP that has a good reputation and setting up SPF, DKIM and DMARC correctly.
> I have used https://mailcow.email/ successfully in the past to host email for a small company. 5-10 users. That was about 3 years ago and it seems that mailcow has improved quite alot in that time and is still under active development. They provide paid support packages if you run into trouble.
This is a good point... If going down the do-it-yourself route without a lot of expertise, compiled mail server in a box type solutions can help a lot. Whether mailcow, Mail-in-a-Box, or whatever they are built using the most common applications but do most of the configuration and interconnect work for you. Most also provide some sort of management UI to make things easier.
The one caution with such solutions is you cannot really incrementally change them or swap components--ie, if you want to use SpamAssassin instead of Rspamd. In some cases they contain custom code that makes generic documentation irrelevant as well... You'll have to rely on mailcow documentation rather than documentation for the individual components for example. To that end, they're effectively software appliances. Be sure to pick the one with the features and support you want because you'll basically be stuck once it's running.
First off, as others have said. Hosting a mail server on a residential ip will result in emails from that server being blocked pretty much everywhere.
There are quite a few requirements with DNS and TXT records to give your email server the best chance of deliverability.
That being said, if you want a super easy, full featured, all on one mail server, checkout this project. Mailcow
It's pretty much everything you could ever want from a mail hosting solution, with great features and really good anti spam integration.
Any email server would work, NC has email client functionality only. Your question should be, what email server is recommended for the $5 DigitalOcan VPS?
Check out this list:
https://project-awesome.org/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted#email
I've heard Mailcow often mentioned?
I've been using mailcow for email, but it also has integrated calendar and contact support. I can't say about the other two as I use nextcloud for that, but the email experince is quite easy to set up and maintain with Docker.
The web client looks pretty nice, though I use thunderbird exclusively and only really looked at it once.
Freeing yourself from Gmail can be done. I've done it.
If you want a good mail server that is pretty damn secure out of the box then have a look at Mailcow Dockerized. Being Docker-based it's not too hard to run on a server that does other stuff too.
Setting up a mail server is not trivial though, even with Mailcow, and you should read the very good documentation on how to get it up and running.
Your biggest challenge will then be the fact that you're using a residential IP, which means you'll be flagged as a spammer by pretty much every recipient, and your outbound mail won't get through.
There's really no way to get a residential IP trusted by the major lists or big mail providers, so you'll need to send from an external proxy of some kind.
Amazon SES is quite popular for this because it's cheap and works well. Maybe your university server could work, but there are a lot of ifs and maybes. It's easy to set Mailcow up to send through an external server. You will need to ensure that you have DNS set up correctly though, including SPF and DMARC.
Your other issue will be getting all your old mail out of Gmail and into your new mail server (assuming you want it there). I like a program called Mailstore Home for archiving and moving big lumps of email.
I can recommend MailCow
I configured mine on a 5$/month Digital Ocean VPS (free if you're a student). If you set up the correct DNS records (SPF, DKIM and DMARC) there is no problem. My emails get trough to gmail and outlook, which was my biggest fear. For a high level description of how to do this, check out this blog . Before you set things up, make sure the IP of your VPS is not blacklisted!
I do not recommend you to configure everything yourself, the people behind mailcow know what they are doing. Should you still be interested, check out this tutorial (part1/4)
You could use mailcow.
100GB, unlimited mail addresses and domains.
Edit: Depending on how many users you have, but if you have more than 39 users, you get under 1$ a month
Mache ich persönlich auch so, ist aber natürlich ein bisschen mehr Aufwand. Falls jemand diesen Weg gehen will kann ich mailcow empfehlen, damit ist alles super einfach eingerichtet
>for linux noobs noobs like me, that would need there to be guides to take you through what to do
I wouldn't recommend running a mail server as a beginner. In this case you should know exactly what you are doing. Even minor mistakes can lead to being put on the "black list" of various providers such as DNSBL. To be removed from this list is sometimes not easy and often takes a long time.
Regardless of that, I think https://mailcow.email/ is not bad.
basically what /u/BleakNotice said
there are full-suites available that do the whole config horror for you, e.g. Mailcow, which I love to death
Basically it's a compilation of all those mentioned services, pretty much already configured and therefore ready to go. It comes with a mighty but very easy to use admin interface, which can be controlled via web
Sounds like Mailcow might be worth looking at. It has more than what you're looking for, but it is Dockerized and pretty easy to get set up.
If using docker is not a problem for you, check mailcow https://mailcow.email/
It's realy easy to setup and you don't need to dive into config files.
Configure a cath-all and then forward message to your personal mail.
I use it since 3 years for my personal inbox and never got problems with it
You could check Mailcow. It is a fully featured mail setup based on docker. The groupware is sogo which supports stuff like tagging and even activesync for push.
I've not looked at it in depth yet, but the first few tests looked extremly promising.
Not true. You require a server not already blacklisted and one configured to not act as an open relay. Any guide worth its salt will teach you that. If all you want to do is to send email you don't need much else. If you want to actually receive email, that's a bit harder. Not because it's a difficult problem, but because you'll get spam. If you're using postfix and rspamd (as an example; I use these on my mail server), you're around five config options away from being able to run a very spam-free server.
If you don't have a spare day to set all this up, checkout mailcow. If you're telling me that this is too difficult, well, then you're better off with someone else managing your email.
I've become a big fan of Mailcow. Through dockerizing its server components, it makes it very easy for a newbie to get up and running.
The particular spam testing tool I used in the screenshot is mail-tester.com.
Ich hab nen eigenen Mail Server am laufen mit Nextcloud, TeamSpeak.
Benutze dafür Mailcow. Die bieten auch Postfächer für wenig Geld oder gleich nen Server direkt bei ihnen mieten, die kümmern sich dann um die Einrichtung.
Bin sehr zufrieden damit, leider läuft es Docker was etwas träge mit der E-Mail Weiterleitung ist (9 sec response), was aber noch okay ist.
Der Server liegt in Schweden mit nem .li & .la Domain und whois protection. Die Festplatte ist verschlüsselt (was man bei nen Server nicht machen sollte Ü aber hilft dabei falls das Ding Mal Beschlagnahmt wird).
Edit: Scheiss Google Autokorrektur
Hosting if your product is something that could be hosted. Ex. Nextcloud. They seem to only be targeting enterprises rather than regular consumers.
MailCow is another example. However, I think they are missing out by only targeting the German market with their paid service.
Ebenfalls für docker: https://mailcow.email Nicht kommerziell (außer Supportoption, die hat aber garnix mit der Software zu tun), open source, jeder kann sich beteiligen. Bei mir im Einsatz, erfüllt für nen privaten Mailserver wirklich alles was man braucht (inkl. gutem Webinterface und Webmailer). Auch gute Dokumentation und man kann bei Problemen einfach fragen.
Try mailcow mailserver suite, it's a bit painful to set up, but once you have it running, it's fantastic.
I've been running it on a custom domain and a $10 DigitalOcean droplet since February, sending out 10,000+ emails/week from a Discourse forum, zero complaints.