[dmje]

I just don't understand the attraction of self hosting email. The pain seems extreme, even for those who understand the considerable number of nuances.

To me the happy middle ground is email on your own domain but using an existing provider such as G / MS or whoever. That way you've got control but don't need to worry about the pain.

It does require paying for but really on balance not much. If you're spending more than an hour a year maintaining your self hosted email (which you will, big time!) then your Google Workspace / O365 is paid for.

The situation I've found frustrating is about family email on same domain. I've gone in a huge loop that has ended up back with GWorkspace which is quite costly for 3-4 family users. But still - not even close to the horror of self hosting...

[dugite-code]

I've selfhosted my own email for almost a decade now. I was spending about 5 min a month on it until my ip block rep died one day for little decernable reason. Then I wasted many hours on it so I switched to sending through amazon ses and I'm back to my 5 min a month (updating packages/checking logs).

It has a few advantages because I can run a bunch of automations and filters. Honestly I get less spam than in my gmail inbox, so I harvest spam from gmail to train my filters now. It's insane to me how much providers charge for an inbox and the tiny sizes many still offer

[sirnoggin]

If it was your IP block rep, then it could have been anyone else on your block who tanked everyone else on the blocks reputation. A few bad apples on a block /24 can tank the lot.

[emptysongglass]

I also use SES for outbound. Haven't even thought of my selfhosted setup (run through Synology's MailPlus) since I first turned it on more than two years ago.

[nottorp]

> If you're spending more than an hour a year maintaining your self hosted email (which you will, big time!) then your Google Workspace / O365 is paid for.

But what's the cost when Google's "AI" bans your account?

For paid email hosting I'd go to some provider with actual support...

[b3kart]

If you use your own domain (as the parent suggests), the cost is creating an account with any other e-mail provider that supports custom domains and updating DNS entries.

[laurent123456]

Since he uses his own domain, he can move elsewhere if there's a problem with Google. I do that too, and it's indeed much simpler than self-hosting.

[hedora]

On that note, I have amazon manage my custom domain.

Now I'm terrified that I'll return one too many pairs of socks or something, and get the retail consumer part of my account banned (we buy a lot of stuff on Amazon).

Does anyone have experience with what happens to AWS resources (specifically, domains) when that happens?

[nottorp]

It sounded like he's actually keeping the emails on google, even though they come on a custom domain. And that doesn't seem safe to me.

[dmje]

I use a client, so have a local IMAP backup, and regularly back this up to my NAS.

That's not really my worry, though. What scares me about being heavily invested in [e-mail] or [e-mail] is lockout from services. As long as I have my own domain then I can just switch out the DNS and I'll still be able to get into whatever web service I signed up to using my email address.

[laurent123456]

For backup he could get Thunderbird or similar to fetch the emails are regular interval. I think it's generally a good idea to do so.

[gnopgnip]

The same thing camps happen with any company. If you have your own domain you can get a new email host, change your mx record. Update your email client to use the new credentials. If you use mobile email, upload existing recent email from your desktop or restore/ import from backup. This means not registering the domain with your email host to avoid problematic delays

[zachrip]

The problem with google email hosting is you can no longer use that account for many of their services such as nest. They just don't support it. Same with google voice. I of course could create another gmail but that defeats the purpose of having my original email, I want everything in one place. If they fixed this I would say it's the best option.

[leokennis]

I agree on your middle ground, with the added step to maintain a local backup of your mail (i.e. .eml files or similar).

[cubesnooper]

> I just don't understand the attraction of self hosting email.

For several years I’ve hosted in the “middle ground” sense described by the OP, running my own incoming mail server and relaying outgoing mail through a big provider.

The main benefit for me (compared to using a big provider with my own domain) is personal privacy. When I used Google for mail, Google had access to so many pieces that make up my personal life: Purchase receipts. Flight itineraries. Conference registrations. Emails from my university. Emails from my realtor. Utility bills. Notifications for subscribed forum threads, GitHub repositories, Wikipedia pages. Whatever newsletters I chose to subscribe to. Theoretical access to any site with password reset by email. Running my own MX eliminates Google’s access to most of these things.

There are other some other benefits too. Free infinite aliases I can use to sign up on any website. No fear of dependence on features that might get paywalled. No sudden danger of having to migrate data to another provider.

> If you're spending more than an hour a year maintaining your self hosted email (which you will, big time!) then your Google Workspace / O365 is paid for.

Reducing my data footprint is something I care about enough to spend my spare time on.

[dmje]

In my world (running a small digital agency), I've realised that even if I do all the things to reduce my data footprint (for instance, migrate all my docs to NextCloud, self host email, etc), it actually all breaks almost instantly - all it takes is a client to share a doc or folder with me where they use GDocs / Dropbox / whatever, and I'm effectively straight back in it.

My basic strategy is one of slight defeatism, I have to admit. I am 100% in to Google for their (really quite excellent) tools in Google Workspace: nothing is as good as GDocs, nothing is as good as Gmail, nothing is as good as Google Meet; but I do things to ensure I'm not utterly f**d if the Random Google AI Best happens to decide I'm some sort of unspecified menace. So for instance - I use Google Docs but only with .docx / .xlsx files rather than native .gdoc .gsheet files. I back this up automatically to my self-hosted NAS. I do this on a domain which I own, so can step away if things do happen to go south, or costs double or whatever.

Then I use kagi.com for search, and have a piHole / ublock / Brave to minimise footprint from a tracking POV.

I know, it's all probably moot given I just open up my inbox to Google, but I've tried and failed to find a provider that is even close to being the same balance of low price + utility. I got excited about Fastmail but turned out it was a combination of not very good AND really expensive once I factored in having several accounts on the same domain. I had a horrific experience with iCloud+ (they have a weird YEAR long account blocking issue thing that I won't go into now). M$ was awful and required me to send everything through GoDaddy's DNS. All the others were just underwhelming or expensive or both. So - sadly - I'm back in the G stable where I'll stay for the time being... :-)