[coldnose]

If anyone's gone through this trouble already, care to explain how you did it? I've been thinking about rolling a VPS with postfix/dovecot, but it seems like such a hassle to maintain, and I'm not super confident in my ability to secure it.

[craftyguy]

Find an email provider, sign up/pay for service, and use it. I recommend buying a domain, so you can have a fairly static email address even if you end up changing providers later on.

Rolling your own email service never seemed worth it to me. You'll have to deal with backups/recovery, maintenance, and any quirks associated with the big mail places rejecting mails from your service. I'm almost certain someone will chime with "but it's not bad!", well, it's not bad until you're on vacation and suddenly your mail service goes down and now you have to either go without mail (stuff sent to you will be rejected), or stop what you are doing to fix it.

[freedomben]

But it's not bad! Jk, I'm a devops guy so I set up servers and infrastructures for a living, and I still think it's a pain in the ass. Mostly getting TLS working is the hard part. If you don't get it right, your emails will all go to the spam folder of the recipient, or just not deliver at all. Hell even if you get it right, that still might happen.

[jiveturkey]

> Find an email provider,

Like google perhaps?

[skbly7]

Yup, I have gone through this. If you aren't confident with your skills you can look up to softwares like VestaCP [1] to setup everything for you. You can also use more advanced solutions like FreedomBox [2].

The pain is worth it!

Another fun tip: Enable catch all for your emails and then provide different email for each purposes, like this website can have email [e-mail] and so on. I love to regularly see which website fucked up handling my email id and I just silently block that email in a click (and hence, much less spams).

[1] https://vestacp.com

[2] https://freedomboxfoundation.org