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Comment by sksksk | Hacker News Reader

With self hosting email, if the digital sovreignty aspect is more important to you than the privacy aspect...

What I do is use gmail with a custom domain, self host an email server, and use mbysnc[1] to always be downloading my emails from gmail. Then I connect to that email server for reading my emails, but still use gmail for sending.

It also means that google can't lock me out of my emails, I still retain all my emails, and if I want move providers, I simply change the DNS records of my domain. But I don't have any issues around mail delivery.

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I did all of those DNS shnigannas with spf, dmarc and others ones like 6 years ago.

I think I had problems with my emails like 2 twice , with one exchange server of some small recruitment company. I think it was misconfigured.

Ah there were also some problem with gmail at the beginning they banned my domain because I was sending test emails to my own account there. I had to register my domain on their BS email post master tools website and configure my DNS with some key.

In overall I had much more problem with automatic backups, services going down for no reason, IPs being dynamic and etc. Email server just works.

The custom domain is all you need for complete e-mail sovereignty. As long as you have it, you can select between hundreds (thousands?) of providers, and take your business elsewhere at any time.

You risk losing your historical emails if you don’t back them up somewhere

Of course you use e-mail clients, so that you have your mails on at least one device. And separate backup as well.

Why not also do the sending? Deliverability concerns?

Yep exactly, it removes a whole class of potentially problems.

Doing the sending myself wouldn't improve my digital sovreignty, which is my primary motivation.

Not OP, but yes. For personal use, you don't have enough traffic to establish reputation, so you get constantly blocked regardless of DKIM/DMARC/SPF/rDNS. Receiving mail is reliable though, so you can do that yourself and outsource just sending to things like Amazon SES or SMTP relays.

Depending on your mail flow, there's SendGrid and other options at a pretty reasonable cost to handle delivery concerns. I have one server set for sendgrid and another I've got setup for direct delivery... the only issue I've had sending from my own is to Outlook.com servers (not o365 or hotmail though). With DMARC/SPF, etc, gmail has been okay as well.

> For personal use, you don't have enough traffic to establish reputation, so you get constantly blocked regardless of DKIM/DMARC/SPF/rDNS.

Been selfhosting personal low traffic email since the 1990's, I don't have that problem.

Me too, since 2016. I had issues with Microsoft, but it has been otherwise flawless.

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