Self Hosted Email vs. Gmail
airinformation.com
airinformation.com
Time has a tendency to make some things worse, self-hosting your email was not spared. Some great stuff has been added over the years, DKIM, DMARC and SPF are all quite easy to manage, but the quality of internet providers has nosedived. Today the generally biggest problem of hosting anything online is that your ISP may not want to provide you with a public routable static IP. The second problem is even worse, and relates to email in specific, your ISP probably still blocks outgoing port 25, meaning that while your self-hosted server can RECEIVE emails well enough, it won't be able to send anything out. You need the aforementioned "smart host" for this, and your ISP might not provide one anymore, leaving their customer with an "Internet" connection that cannot do Internet related things, such as sending email! This is obviously an outrage, but apparantly there are not legislation defining minimum requirements for internet connections.. Imagine if electricity and water providers were allowed the same freedom.. "What? you want around 50 hz at around 230volt? Sorry sir, that's our premium package, what we deliver is between 23 and 120 hz at whatever the volt we want!" and your water company being "Oh, this definitely _IS_ water, guaranteed 25% of it!"
As I will continue saying until I am blue in the face, _this is not true_ . Ads that are displayed in consumer gmail are powered by your web activity same as any other ad, but not your email. If you are a paid user, even more stringent rules apply and you don’t see ads in gmail.
If OP wants to run their own mail server because they don’t want to support Google, totally fine, and it’s great to have articles about doing that. But that’s a lot of work, and people who don’t want to do that shouldn’t have to worry that their emails will be read.
(Disclosure: I work at Google, used to work on Workspace, which Gmail is a part of)
And Google still processes the content of your emails, no? Are all of those smart features like identifying flight bookings done completely client-side (hint: they're not)?
> Although Google stopped scanning email content to tailor ads in 2017, last year the company started showing shopping ads in Gmail. And it still scans emails to facilitate so-called smart features such as the ability to add holiday bookings or deliveries straight to your calendar, or to autocomplete suggestions.
> Every way you interact with your Gmail account can be monitored, such as the dates and times you email at, who you are talking to, and topics you choose to email about, says Rowenna Fielding, founder of privacy consultancy Miss IG Geek.
[Source](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/may/09/how-priva...)
> And Google still processes the content of your emails, no? Are all of those smart features like identifying flight bookings done completely client-side
Of course, no, but the same is true of things like spam detection. What is the difference between scanning emails to see if they are spam and scanning emails to see if they are flight details? Or to scan emails to see if they have malware? In all these cases they’re not used for anything outside of Workspace, and they all provide some value to users.
> Every way you interact with your Gmail account can be monitored, such as the dates and times you email at, who you are talking to, and topics you choose to email about
Sure, yes, this could be monitored. This is the equivalent of saying, “when you use a saas product, the provider can see what you do”. It’s both obvious and uncontroversial- even the e2e encrypted messaging apps can see who you are communicating with and when.
The important consideration is that Google doesn’t use this for anything that is personally identifiable. You can choose to believe this or not, that’s up to you, but the same is true of literally every saas service everywhere.
For personal email a good option here is to use a relay for sending mail (or for sending important mail). Of course the downside is that the relay can see your mail in plaintext.
I currently use migadu and it's almost perfect, except for the API access. I don't care about storing e-mails, just give me a programmatic way to create aliases. Wish they just had API access available as an addon. /rant
A commercial email provider like Fastmail charges $5/month (less if paying annually) for mailbox with 30 GB limit, with free unlimited email aliases and free custom domains. If you are happy with a single mail storage location, this is much easier and cheaper too.
But using GMail doesn't give you any experience in system administration, is not satisfying, and no one will hire you because you know how to create a GMail account.
Also, if you pay for a server, you have a server, you don't have to limit yourself to email. You can host a few web pages, make a personal VPN, maybe even a small Minecraft server, or whatever fun project you can think of.
So while catch-all solves the problem of receiving emails on random email addresses on your domain it gets tricky when you have send emails from those addresses. (Apple mail client allows you to do this in a convoluted way - you have to add the email in advance and if you forgot it’ll be sent from another email)
The values to configure in DNS are available as parameters in the link on the M365 side.
YMMV, of course, but DNS is DNS.
Will they support it? Unlikely. Will it work forever? No way to be sure, but isn't everything temporary anyway?
In 2022 I am going to host it somewhere more reliant, but for now i use the mailserver of my ISP.
Bit offtopic: I used AnonAdddy (https://github.com/anonaddy/docker) for my email-aliases.
Using any "package" with require unnecessary management, updates, etc. Surely there are fancy bells and whistles, but do we really need it?
what do you do when a vulnerability has been posted and impacts you?
Not to this extend, installing things from packages are okay.
> what do you do when a vulnerability has been posted and impacts you?
There were no substantial vulnerabilities for those packages in years, if my memory doesn't fail me. But even is something comes up, there are additional measures like fail2ban on open ports.
I used to self host email about a decade ago, but considering how complicated it can get with blocklists, residential IP blocks and just functional spam filtering, it seems to be much better to just leave it to dedicated people. I'm aware that people self host email for privacy, but email is not a private communication form, at least not in 2022. Any email will have at least 2 parties, and if you don't control the remote end, your privacy is non existing.
Up to 30% of all emails will go to Gmail alone (https://emailanalytics.com/gmail-statistics/), and then you can add all the Google Workspace users, Outlook (personal or business users), and you'll easily end up with 60-70% of all emails at some point ending up with one of the cloud email providers.
It's the best VPS provider I've seen, and their cheap servers are big enough that you can throw Mailcow (or Mail-in-a-box, or mailu, for a smaller mail solution with fewer fancy features) onto it without performance tweaks. Same advantages, but better bang-for-the-buck.
I'm not sure if I'd go with Amazon for DNS hosting, though, I don't trust their DNS servers ever since their DNSSEC implementation took down Slack for a while.
Sounds great.
I pay $3.5 for 1gb + ssd + maybe 1 or 2 cores? But it's in the US and I do need it to be in the US.
It does have gigabit though.
I think they've got their formula down well. There are a lot of applications that need more than the 200mbps connection these cheap servers have, but there are also many services that would run fine with even less than that. You don't need a lot of network capacity if you're just hosting stuff for your own personal use, after all.
That way you can write your own storage/homepage for handling all your internet needs running in one process.
The biggest problem with selfhosting is spam, and for that I'm going for IP + geolocation so that you can filter things by from where your spam is coming from.
If that fails I'm going to have an authorized from address list system and some kind of RAM only this spam might be something... but that will be memory constrained and lost on reboot!
Eventally we are going to need hashes provided with each new (unauthorized) mail, it's sad but that is the way humans work.
The problems you end up with is dealing with the big fish in this space. For instance, Microsoft are currently blocking all/most/a lot-of mail from Linode IPs and have been since 21 Dec regardless of individual server reputation[0].
[0] https://www.linode.com/community/questions/22287/550-57511-a...
But more broadly, any prepaid service is potentially an 'exit scam' and the point is to minimise your risk.
So in the end the price of the service (along with quality/value) is really the main consideration. Losing $20 at some point in a year is not much of a risk. I've used many providers, maybe using a bit of judgement, and I've only once come anywhere close to this, but even that seemed to just be a business failure and my account was sold but the replacement service was not as good.
I'm not convinced this is better than a paid for alternative to Gmail.