I use both protonmail and tutanota atm. Had good experiences so far tbh! But for those I know that are truly dedicated to the foss lifestyle, most I know either self host their email service or use something like posteo/distroot. Some I know use riseup as well but I think it’s propertiary I think but have a huge emphasis on privacy though and being very anti corporate.
I should think so, though honestly I have not gotten any spam from protonmail/tutanota ever since I switched over from gmail years back and I’ve only gotten emails that’s I’ve signed up to or that I know are relevant to me aka important emails.
Services like gmail survive by spying on your emails in relation to also having ads on their services, hence why you get so many emails and junk you don’t remember signing up on the promotions tab, despite gmail is supposed to be well renowned for “anti-spam” whilst also not being totally private whatsoever cuz of it. It’s all just a cover tbh esp with top free mail providers.
Proton if you don’t know how to set up your own email service, your own email service if you do. It’s surprisingly easy to get your own email. HostGator even gives you free email services if you buy hosting for a domain. Just register your domain, point the DNS at HostGator, set up emails through cpanel, and use the FairEmail client to access your server. Easy peasy! Absolutely zero prying eyes, you have full control, and you get an apache server node as a bonus.
I like fastmail. I decided to skip on proton (I also just never tried it) because it just seemed too popular. Fastmail also tied into my password manager and is easy to create masked emails. I like them a lot.
Awesome! Can you elaborate a bit on your experience because a ton of folks keeps repeating that locally hosted email is a nonstarter. Do you send a lot of emails and do they actually come through?
Unfortunately, mail is a complex subject. Those folks are generally right. I’ve been doing this awhile, and know what I am doing. My solution will blow the doors off of canned solutions in both performance and lack of false positives. But it is a custom solution and I do not recommend it for most people. I had toyed with the idea of putting a management console on the thing, but for the effort involved, I didn’t feel it is worth it these days with barracuda and proxmox mail gateway products out there.
One big item to deal with if you self host these days is to be on IP address space that is not blacklisted by most spam filters. Comcast’s non-business IP space, for example. Linode for another. If you are in this situation, you can relay through a third party, but you are then not controlling things end to end.
Another issue now is that many recipient providers are requiring valid dmarc, dkim, and spf records. You will need to have all three properly configured for the domains that you manage.
What you might want to do, though, is perhaps host your own mail security relays that stand in front of your ‘ready to go’ mail provider of choice. This is much slower than mine, but is what I would use if standing something up for a company these days: www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-mail-gateway/overview
Or if you want to host everything yourself, there are some solutions out there so you no longer need to piece it together. Search for ‘self hosted email’. I would still put a mail gateway like proxmox in front of it for your edge security and filtering though.
You need to get your email into some big data databases. It’s fucking bullshit, but until your address is tracked by all the snooping bullshit companies, a lot of services will reject it. They run checks with services like Informatica to verify if it’s a valid email or not, and if they’ve never seen your address before, they’ll mark it as fake. That was the hardest part of using my own email server at the beginning, getting all these asshole spy networks to recognize me.
I have had my dedicated IP and server for 7 years now. It still gets flagged as spam, but not blocked. If I knew it was this annoying, I would have never done all this work.
I’ve just used HostGator email services set up through cpanel for about 7 years now and the only issues I had were forms not accepting the email addresses at first because they were unknown emails and domains. Maybe consider migrating to a known service to resolve your issues. I don’t even pay them for it, it just came free with my shared hosting package which is like $10 per month.
True. It’s basically impossible to fully self host nowadays. You can host for your local users and use a/your provider to route and possibly act as your MX if you really want to go that way. In that case most hosting providers that let you edit the DNS files will do.
I have. My main problem wasn’t so much that I was getting flagged as spam, but that the spam filtering on the receiving side was just awful. I also don’t send many emails so it may well be the case that I just happened to not experience that problem.
those are two completely different things mate. One is paying for something and the other is getting blasted with ads. Either make it paid or make it free but dont make a free version that blasts me with ads. Thats lacking respect imo.
I got shut down big time when I recently suggested companies pay for open source projects with a tiny percentage of their revenue so customers who dont actually generate revenue with foss and provide valuable testing dont have to.
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