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I would like to ask my fellow soylentists... What do you do for an email solution?
For almost 20 years, I have had my own personal domains along with corresponding websites, email, and any other needed service. As I am older now, I no longer need any of the visibility of my own website; I do not need it for getting new jobs, or to host any application or service. However, I still need email. My current ISP has annoyed me with rising fees and a lack of any service (not surprisingly, it went downhill really fast once their business was merged with another.)
So, I am looking to drop everything except the actual domains and the email, (not to mention change providers.) What solutions does everyone else use? Are you happy with your provider?
The biggest feature I am looking for is some type of "catchall" email address. While I realize this means a lot more spam, I am already filtering the 99% of that out. For years, I have created many single use email addresses for various websites. (e.g. keyword@mydomain.xxx ) IMO, this creates better security, because anyone trying to access my accounts need to know the email address I used as well as the password, and I also find out which websites sell my email address to others or get breached. It seems that the majority of sites do not have this simple feature anymore.
Due to my multiple handles, most of the simple email sites will not work for me. Not to mention sites that charge per email handle are not very good either. While I can consolidate with a catch-all address, this is not a preferred method.
I prefer POP3 so that I can have multiple devices access my email and webmail is a plus but not required.
So does anyone know of a email site that will fit my needs? Or is my best chance to create my own email server on a linode VPS? (Though I would prefer a simple premade solution instead of maintaining my own server at this point.)
(Score: 2) by SemperOSS on Wednesday August 14 2019, @11:19AM
OK, I get that you prefer not to set up your own system and apologise up front that I am actually proposing to do just that.
I have had a long journey with hosting my own E-mail system (for me, my family and some friends) starting with Sendmail and its arcane set-up and configuration. Difficult to set up and maintain, and at the time got more security holes than a golf course. I changed to Postfix, which was not only slightly less arcane and much more secure, but also substantially faster. The configuration was still somewhat (actually quite) difficult and some of the things I wanted to do took me too much time to figure out and implement, so eventually I gave that up and turned to Exim.
I currently run Exim 4 in a three machine set-up (that could easily be one machine, but in my set-up one machine acts as firewall, one is for my friend's domains and one for my domains, the latter two backing up E-mails to the other mail server). The mail access is either IMAP (my preferred) or POP3 through Nginx on the firewall to Courier on the mail servers.
I have configured the mail servers to provide E-mail to the login users on the mail servers (basically my friend on his and me on mine) and a number of "virtual" users without shell logins on the mail servers. In addition to the individual mail accounts, I have also defined some "aliases" where I distribute mail to people based on the recipient E-mail address (like both@example.com, which would be distributed to my partner's E-mail address and mine, family@example.com would be distributed to the pre-defined family members). The mail is passed through Spamassassin and ClamAV, which reduces the amount of spam and the security risks somewhat.
To make it possible to use a number of E-mail addresses for each user, I have a variation of your catch-all address: tailored E-mail addresses. Incoming E-mails are checked to see if they contain a valid user name (real or virtual) after a dash and is sent to that user's mailbox. If my address were, say, sempeross@example.com, any address on the form whatever.address-I-like-for-sempeross@example.com will be plunked in my mailbox. I use this to tailor addresses to each potential sender (and thus make it easier to ignore them later on, should they be abused). For SoylentNews I would use something like soylentnews.org-sempeross@example.com, for example.
After having set up the mail system as above, which took some time, to be honest, I find the maintenance efforts negligible, as I only have to keep the system up to date, which means executing "apt update && apt upgrade" on a regular basis — and even that could be automated, if I wanted to. I have the benefit of a tailored system, which now commands minimal maintenance effort yet offers a lot of functionality.
I don't need a signature to draw attention to myself.
Maybe I should add a sarcasm warning now and again?