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posted by martyb on Wednesday August 14 2019, @01:54AM   Printer-friendly
from the ask-SoylentNews dept.

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.)


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  • (Score: 2) by datapharmer on Wednesday August 14 2019, @02:13AM (14 children)

    by datapharmer (2702) on Wednesday August 14 2019, @02:13AM (#879926)

    If privacy isn’t too much of a concern for this inbox content GSuite actually offers everything you are wanting for a pretty fair price.

    I would strongly suggest push or imap over pop3. Gsuite supports single app passwords for email clients and such that do not support multi-factor authentication.

    They support catch all email addresses or you can use arbitrary periods in an existing email to differentiate/filter by sent to.

    If this is only for you as much as it pains me to say so I would strongly suggest against running your own mail server. It just isn’t worth the headache anymore between arbitrary blacklisting of your IP causing deliverability issues to constant attacks from crackers and malicious message processing, spf, dkim, patching vulnerabilities in dovecot and exim, Yada yada etc etc. it is just much more reliable and hassle free to use a commercial vendor operating out of a datacenter with dedicated IPs for their email if reliable delivery is more important to you than the learning experience/hobby aspect.

    • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @02:26AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @02:26AM (#879934)

      If it is just email. May I suggest office365? The pricing is *very* reasonable per month. If you do not like it... pick one of the others.

      • (Score: 2) by stretch611 on Thursday August 15 2019, @05:36PM

        by stretch611 (6199) on Thursday August 15 2019, @05:36PM (#880659)

        Yes, pretty much email only....

        But seeing how I run linux on every computer on my home,

        A) I pretty much am not in favor of adding to Microsoft's revenue stream
        B) I'm not positive of compatibility with linux based clients. I would expect to be able to get some clients working, but not necessarily the ones that I want to use.
        C) I do not believe that Microsoft has any benefit at all when compared to Google on privacy. (They both suck in that regard.)

        --
        Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
    • (Score: 4, Informative) by edIII on Wednesday August 14 2019, @03:24AM (6 children)

      by edIII (791) on Wednesday August 14 2019, @03:24AM (#879951)

      If this is only for you as much as it pains me to say so I would strongly suggest against running your own mail server. It just isn’t worth the headache anymore between arbitrary blacklisting of your IP causing deliverability issues to constant attacks from crackers and malicious message processing, spf, dkim, patching vulnerabilities in dovecot and exim, Yada yada etc etc. it is just much more reliable and hassle free to use a commercial vendor operating out of a datacenter with dedicated IPs for their email if reliable delivery is more important to you than the learning experience/hobby aspect.

      This is FUD more or less. Certainly the difference between a sysadmin worth his salt ,and one that isn't.

      -- IP reputation isn't impossible to manage. Definitely find a reputable host for your server first. A good datacenter, or a reputable virtual provider. After a year or two of good behavior, plus clean up efforts, those blacklisting events should be few and far between. I've only had a couple of notable events in 20 years that I actually had to work at. 80% of my delisting efforts were emails and forms that were fairly painless. On average every 2 years for me now. It's manageable.

      -- ALL servers are under constant attack all the time. You're basically advocating never running a server by yourself, ever again. I don't want to lock myself into choosing from different SAAS providers, especially when I can actually handle it myself. Use Fail2Ban and set yourself up a proper firewall. A lot of that noise you refer to is eliminated through the use of a good firewall and serveral RBLs.

      -- SPF and DKIM are not mystical arts beyond the comprehension of mortal men. Just set the damn things up and publish some TXT records in your DNS. Sheesh. Set up DMARC for achievement awards for completeness :)

      -- Anybody can have access to datacenter IP networks by renting it. $6/mo is fairly affordable and that just got you the IP addresses you're exclusively associating with SAAS providers.

      You don't have to give up, and then give it up the Google. Lord, No.

      --
      Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
      • (Score: 2) by datapharmer on Wednesday August 14 2019, @10:02AM

        by datapharmer (2702) on Wednesday August 14 2019, @10:02AM (#880052)

        I don’t know stretch611’s skill set, but I’ve seen enough spam farm activity coming from misconfigured and unmaintained vps networks that I’m sure that isn’t the easiest or the cheapest solution. As I said, it depends on concerns of privacy but someone who doesn’t have the time or skill set to prosperity maintain a mail server on an ongoing basis is doing themselves and the internet at large a disservice it they “set it and forget it”. As far as privacy goes, there is something to gain from doing it yourself, but doing it on a VPS just means you trust them more than you trust google and it is important to keep in mind the other end of that email is still likely going to one of 3 or 4 providers anyhow. As for calling the setup issues such as blacklisting fud - I didn’t mean they were insurmountable, but you made my actual point for me by saying it can take a year or 2 to clean them up. Most people want something that just works without it being unreliable for a year or more while cleaning up the reputation of the IP. It most certainly can be done, but the pain/reward isn’t for everyone and the question started out asking for an email site that could meet their list of needs - they already had “setup linode” as an alternative.

      • (Score: 5, Interesting) by ilsa on Wednesday August 14 2019, @12:05PM (3 children)

        by ilsa (6082) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday August 14 2019, @12:05PM (#880101)

        That is NOT FUD.

        Maintaining your own email server IS a pain in the ass. I've been running one myself and it's bloody annoying. On the one side, spam management has become unwieldy to the point where it's not even worth trying to manage it yourself anymore. You have to pay for a separate service anyway.

        On the other side, you have to futz around so much with your server because different recipients have so many, sometimes non-RFC compliant requirements for how your email is sent to them that you may end up getting blocked even if everything is configured correctly. Running a mail server is not like it was 20 years ago. What EHLO are you sending? How's your SFP record? DKIM? Do you have a reverse DNS pointer record configured? The list goes on and on.

        It's one thing to support a mail server as part of your job. It's another to do it personally. If it's not something you are prepared to actively and constantly babysit, then you will not enjoy running your own server.

        • (Score: 2) by pvanhoof on Wednesday August 14 2019, @05:43PM (2 children)

          by pvanhoof (4638) on Wednesday August 14 2019, @05:43PM (#880385) Homepage

          Running a mail server is not like it was 20 years ago. What EHLO are you sending? How's your SFP record? DKIM? Do you have a reverse DNS pointer record configured? The list goes on and on.

          Hmm. Actually. That's about it. You maybe also want to make sure not to be on too many block-lists. But if you are not configured to be an open relay, you wont be. And more actually: that reverse DNS will do most of what you need. And actually actually, this is only if you also want to be the SMTP server that sends the E-mails out. For receiving the other SMTP servers will not care much that they are delivering to an MX that has no reverse DNS pointer record, SFP record or DKIM.

          Additionally, setting up an SFP record is too easy to be true. More easy than getting reverse DNS pointer record right. Since usually the ISP that gave you the IP adres must do that for you.

          Finally, just go here [mxtoolbox.com], let the diagnostic run, and do what they say.

          • (Score: 2) by ilsa on Wednesday August 14 2019, @09:20PM (1 child)

            by ilsa (6082) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday August 14 2019, @09:20PM (#880538)

            I've done all of that, and I still find I get grief sometimes, where my email just doesn't make it. One time I was trying to figure out why a recipient wasn't getting my email, and it turns out that I wasn't sending some header exactly the way they like it, but what they wanted wasn't even RFC compliant. Email can be hair-ripping.

            And then there's having to deal with the usual production server issues, like making sure updates are run regularly, taking backups, etc.

            Point being, maintaining an email server is non-trivial, especially for someone who isn't already a full-time sysadmin. And it's a long-term commitment, which again is difficult for people who arn't full-time sysadmins already.

            • (Score: 2) by edIII on Saturday August 17 2019, @11:52PM

              by edIII (791) on Saturday August 17 2019, @11:52PM (#881606)

              It's just not that difficult. I have to do sysadmin crap all day long, and I rarely, if ever, have to do much with my mail servers.

              I check in once in awhile to apply updates. Every year or so, I fully update the Linux distribution and a usually a major revision of Zimbra ZCS. This is not back breaking work. I have a buildsheet and the whole thing takes me a few hours at most.

              Reverse DNS is something that actually got a lot easier. At first I needed to make a phone call to somebody at a datacenter and request it. That was time consuming. These days it's a setting on my virtual server, and done in literally 1 second. In fact, all of my DNS records, SPF, DKIM, were sorted out in less than 15 minutes. They are not difficult, and there are plenty of easy to use tools.

              You describe a hell of NDRs that I just haven't had to experience. I overstated how difficult the blacklisting was, and I've never seen my mail server get rejected because of a major blacklisting. I just get rid of them to be completely clean, but you really only have to care about the majors. I've dealt with three major delivery issues in 20 years. Craigslist, because they're morons and were blocking a hell of lot more than just me, and two specific corporations. In both cases I had to work a little. Still, THREE times in 20 years. Hardly something to throw the baby out with the bathwater over.

              The updating is automatic, the backups automated and nightly, firewalls tied into RBLs, and I get plenty of notifications if something needs to be done.

              Email is the least demanding of the systems I administrate, and the most rewarding, because I'm not subject to Google, Microsoft, or some ISP.

              --
              Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
      • (Score: 2) by stretch611 on Thursday August 15 2019, @05:45PM

        by stretch611 (6199) on Thursday August 15 2019, @05:45PM (#880664)

        I actually have dealt with this in the past. I am familiar with setting up the various records on the DNS in order to avoid being put on blacklists.

        But, honestly, I am at the point where I would rather have someone else deal with it.

        My primary focus has always been application development. Because of the crossover between that and server management when using web applications, I have been forced into a sysadmin role at times. I always did research things I needed to do and I believe that I successfully did them, but I always have worried that I might have missed something. That being said, I have done the sysadmin role even for small clients that provided services to banks and I have had my server successfully pass the banks audits and reviews. But; that doesn't mean I really want to be a sysadmin if I don't have to be one on a personal email server.

        --
        Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
    • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday August 14 2019, @02:23PM (1 child)

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday August 14 2019, @02:23PM (#880214) Journal

      Yep. Gmail. For ease. Not privacy.

      But the other way I get a free email solution is to dissolve email in water.

      --
      People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 16 2019, @02:50AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 16 2019, @02:50AM (#880847)

        Gmail never. Using Gmail has negative externalities that affect other people who need to communicate with you as well. Never engage with companies that violate people's privacy en masse.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @02:49PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @02:49PM (#880238)

      "...you can use arbitrary periods in an existing email to differentiate/filter by sent to."

      You can also do something like username+keyword@gmail, and filter on the keyword. Unfortunately, majority of the Internet considers the plus symbol to be an invalid email character.

      • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Wednesday August 14 2019, @03:17PM (1 child)

        by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Wednesday August 14 2019, @03:17PM (#880260) Journal
        The ignoring of periods is part of the RFC. Any email server that doesn't support it is broken.
        --
        SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @05:13PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @05:13PM (#880353)

          But your customer is not receiving your mail.

  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @02:17AM (6 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @02:17AM (#879930)

    "I prefer POP3 so that I can have multiple devices access my email and webmail is a plus but not required."

    Isn't that what IMAP is good at, rather than POP?

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by qzm on Wednesday August 14 2019, @04:51AM (5 children)

      by qzm (3260) on Wednesday August 14 2019, @04:51AM (#879987)

      Yes, POP3 is almost the opposite of useful for that.. which makes the whole thing seem a bit odd.. but maybe it was just a brainfart.

      • (Score: 5, Informative) by Luke on Wednesday August 14 2019, @05:43AM (3 children)

        by Luke (175) on Wednesday August 14 2019, @05:43AM (#880000)

        Maybe not a complete brainfart - you can tell your client to leave mail on the POP server for x length of time - thus making it available for multiple clients to download.

        This is useful because you can effectively 'back up' mail across different systems, and collect recent mail again should you accidentally delete it from your system.

        Importantly YOU retain control of the data and although I'm not naive enough to think it'd ultimately be much more 'private' than an IMAP server it does at least allow you to remove your 'online' email from a cursory review by others.

        • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday August 14 2019, @01:37PM (2 children)

          by RS3 (6367) on Wednesday August 14 2019, @01:37PM (#880159)

          Maybe not a complete brainfart - you can tell your client to leave mail on the POP server for x length of time - thus making it available for multiple clients to download.

          This is useful because you can effectively 'back up' mail across different systems, and collect recent mail again should you accidentally delete it from your system.

          Which is what I generally do; only problem is merging "sent" mail across machines. I mostly send on one machine for that reason, but occasionally need to on another machine or within webmail.

          • (Score: 2) by pvanhoof on Wednesday August 14 2019, @05:52PM (1 child)

            by pvanhoof (4638) on Wednesday August 14 2019, @05:52PM (#880392) Homepage

            Make a Sent folder under INBOX (some IMAP servers even allow it at the same level as INBOX I think) and some E-mail clients will automatically recognize it. I know with Evolution on GNOME you can configure it to be the folder to store E-mails in after sending.

            If somebobody knows how to do this with the SailfishOS E-mail client without hacking it, let me know. Else I'll need to change its sources and repackage it someday .. (but I'm lazy)

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 15 2019, @05:53PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 15 2019, @05:53PM (#880672)

              Your special folders are recommended to be one of the "top-level" folders, along with "INBOX." Basically, folders aren't really folders, but 7-bit clean, UTF-8 coerced names separated by a server-selected separator that can be ignored as a hierarchy by the client. So, it's not surprising that your software autodetection got thrown off if you went too far afield of the recommendations.

              But for your question, different programs have different configuration places to override the defaults because not everybody follows the recommended names. To change it on Sailfish, you can edit the config file for QMP directly or override it for a particular account by editing the SQLite file like this: https://together.jolla.com/question/159328/email-app-imap-folder-assignment-logic/ [jolla.com]

      • (Score: 2) by stretch611 on Thursday August 15 2019, @05:47PM

        by stretch611 (6199) on Thursday August 15 2019, @05:47PM (#880667)

        yup... brainfart. I admit it.

        --
        Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
  • (Score: 3, Informative) by ataradov on Wednesday August 14 2019, @02:20AM (5 children)

    by ataradov (4776) on Wednesday August 14 2019, @02:20AM (#879931) Homepage

    FastMail. I'm extremely happy with the service they provide.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @05:49AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @05:49AM (#880002)

      Seconded. Using it both for my business and personnal accounts for a lot of years. No trouble. POP3 and IMAP working as a charm. Lot of configuration options. Efficient SPAM filtering (worked for two years with an account that was made public by the anonymous assholes without too much inconvenience). And a very nice webmail interface.

    • (Score: 2) by WizardFusion on Wednesday August 14 2019, @05:59AM

      by WizardFusion (498) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday August 14 2019, @05:59AM (#880004) Journal

      DItto. I have about 3 or 4 domains all pointing at FM, which allows me to choose who to send from.
      Service is great, and everything is easy to set up.

    • (Score: 2) by DavePolaschek on Wednesday August 14 2019, @12:03PM

      by DavePolaschek (6129) on Wednesday August 14 2019, @12:03PM (#880099) Homepage Journal

      Fourthed, or whatever. They also are one of the primary developers of JMAP [jmap.io] so that we might not be reliant on POP3/IMAP forever, which I think is a pretty good thing to be doing.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @03:12PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @03:12PM (#880257)

      Paid account holder since 2002. Multiple domains. They keep changing the interface and hiding the advanced features, but it mostly works.

    • (Score: 1) by John-S on Wednesday August 14 2019, @03:35PM

      by John-S (7313) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday August 14 2019, @03:35PM (#880271)

      I too am EXTREMELY satisfied with FastMail, they've been my primary for well over 10 years now (back when they were xsmail.com).

      I have also found their domain record support to be far and away superior to anything I could pay for on DynDns or my primary registraar, NamesDirect.com/Dotster.com

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @02:46AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @02:46AM (#879936)

    This is a bit hard to answer what is best because you need to answer the question: how many addresses need to receive, how many need to send, and how many people need access? It is important to keep in mind that for many email providers, you only need an "account" or "box" or whatever they call it for an individual person and addresses are treated as different entities and sometimes they are split between sending and receiving. For example, I have a number of domains that need zero outgoing email addresses. For those, my domain name registrar provides free email forwarding for arbitrary email addresses to the address of my choice. For other domains, I have a number of incoming addresses but anything outgoing comes from the same single address that is accessible for multiple people. For those, I either share the one sending box (password and everything) among the people who access them, or have an incoming alias that is mapped to their accounts, depending on the use. If the needs get to big or complex, I just add them to a mail server on Linode.

    That is a rough start, but should give you some idea. for next steps or questions.

  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @02:48AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @02:48AM (#879937)

    Got fed up with spam, and didn't want to spend CPU time processing it. Set up postfix, got a list of five random words, wrote them down in my wallet, set them up to be aliases that forward to an address that I read.

    Someone wants my email address, I look in my wallet for what word to give them. If it starts collecting junk, I remove that alias.

  • (Score: 4, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday August 14 2019, @02:49AM (6 children)

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Wednesday August 14 2019, @02:49AM (#879938) Homepage Journal

    Push or second a few stories a day as an editor and audioguy or mechanicjay will be happy to set you up with as many addresses as you like on the soylentnews.org domain.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
    • (Score: 3, Funny) by chromas on Wednesday August 14 2019, @04:10AM (3 children)

      by chromas (34) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday August 14 2019, @04:10AM (#879977) Journal

      Can I get root@soylentnews.org?

      • (Score: 3, Touché) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday August 14 2019, @04:23AM (2 children)

        by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Wednesday August 14 2019, @04:23AM (#879980) Homepage Journal

        If you really want it, maybe. It's not like our email accounts are tied to our shell accounts but you might have to have a cage match with NCommander over it.

        --
        My rights don't end where your fear begins.
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @10:40AM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @10:40AM (#880060)

          What's NCommander's current standing in the lists?
          Just asken.

    • (Score: 2) by Gaaark on Wednesday August 14 2019, @05:50PM (1 child)

      by Gaaark (41) on Wednesday August 14 2019, @05:50PM (#880390) Journal

      Maybe do this as a subscription offer!

      --
      --- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
  • (Score: 2) by edIII on Wednesday August 14 2019, @03:12AM

    by edIII (791) on Wednesday August 14 2019, @03:12AM (#879945)

    There are many online services that will attempt to sell you what you can do yourself with a Linux server and FOSS.

    You want a few things:

    1. Unlimited Aliases
    2. Catch-all per domain
    3. Basic SPAM support with SPAM traps

    My domain provider allows me to set some basic DNS records for free each month. So I'm assuming you could manage the DNS records on your own for your domains.

    That leaves an email server. I think for ~$6/mo Vultr will sell you a server that will fit your needs with nightly backups included. Unless you have 100GB email accounts with emails from 1992 archived, the storage size should be adequate. You can install Centos7/Ubuntu, and probably more distributions, and then install an email server.

    I highly suggest Zimbra ZCS:

    1. It's open source
    2. Web based client and administration
    3. Can be provisioned for catch-all per domain
    4. Handles aliases quite well
    5. You can have profiles per alias that assist you in masquerading as that email address automatically. Based on both folder and destination address
    6. Does have SPAM support. I think it automatically creates spam training accounts, but you can provision those manually too.
    7. Great support for use of multiple different RBLs for SPAM. (SpamCop, Spamhaus, etc.)
    8. Filters allow you to route email based on rulesets. Pretty nifty, and you could redirect other spam training accounts to be forwarded to the main one too. Should allow multiple per domain

    I've been using this for several years and it works great.

    --
    Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
  • (Score: 2) by black6host on Wednesday August 14 2019, @03:42AM (2 children)

    by black6host (3827) on Wednesday August 14 2019, @03:42AM (#879962) Journal

    I posted a similar question in one of my journal entries a whiles back. Here is one reply that may help you:
    https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=27929&page=1&cid=744572#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @04:09AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @04:09AM (#879976)

    I've been using 1and1 for the past three years. It has all the features you're asking for. I pay around $100 a year. You'll also get a website and some other features but you're free not to use them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%261_Ionos [wikipedia.org]

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by ledow on Wednesday August 14 2019, @07:15AM (1 child)

    by ledow (5567) on Wednesday August 14 2019, @07:15AM (#880015) Homepage

    Rent a VPS. They are literally pence per month if you're not using much.
    Point the domain MX records at it.
    Install postfix / postgrey.
    Have it forward your email to - well, whatever you want. GMail, Hotmail, anything convenient, or install Dovecot and collect directly.

    In my case it forwards to an ancient GMail account (from the days of having to be invited to get one), but it also saves locally which is collected over IMAP.

    But when something happens, I have control... I have two inboxes with the same content. I have the capability to properly block email that I don't want (and I use a unique alias@mydomain.com for everything I sign up for). I can forward email to any destination (e.g. I forward some aliases for family and friends to their accounts) and on a moment's notice, and I can just keep pointing more domains at it.

    The config isn't difficult and tends to stay pretty static unless I'm tinkering. It's very portable if some VPS provider pees me off. And I can move it to any server if I really cared.

    I used to pay for forwarding/email etc. but inevitably you just don't have the same control and the config is never portable between providers.

    And with proper greylisting, querying of SBL, etc. nothing bad gets through. I even reject aliases that have been released into the wild permanently (many providers get hacked and your email ends up on the spam lists, so I just block the whole alias).

    It's a day of maintenance a year, if that, and that tends to be tinkering rather than "OMG, everyone is blocking all my email and I have to radically change the way I work".

    Never forget - with email, your server can be down for hours if necessary... the other mail servers will catch it all back up.

    Just don't try and do it off a dynamic IP address or home ISP IP range, because everyone else will ignore you. VPS or dedicated server.

  • (Score: 2) by bradley13 on Wednesday August 14 2019, @07:58AM (2 children)

    by bradley13 (3053) on Wednesday August 14 2019, @07:58AM (#880030) Homepage Journal

    Gmail and G-Suite are great, unless you care about your privacy.

    We moved to a local ISP who provides unlimited email addresses that we can configure ourselves, including forward-only and auto-answer-only addresses. I believe that this can include a "catch-all" address, but I'm not certain. We read email with Thunderbird (and K9-Mail), using IMAP and leaving mail on the server. This makes it easy to read from multiple devices; because the mail is downloaded, it is also easy to include in local backups.

    It's not worth trying to run your own mail server. The main reason is trust: an ISP can get their SMTP server whitelisted. Many sites will assume that mail from an unknown private server is spam.

    p.s. Your security measure with single-use email addresses: May I suggest that there are better uses for your time? The security you gain is minimal: if some database is compromised, it will include the email address as well as the (hopefully hashed) password. Your security increment by having different addresses for different accounts is essentially zero, as long as you don't re-use passwords.

    --
    Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by barbara hudson on Wednesday August 14 2019, @03:26PM

      by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Wednesday August 14 2019, @03:26PM (#880267) Journal
      I suspect it's to catch people who give the email address to spammers. Nobody likes spammers.
      --
      SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
    • (Score: 2) by stretch611 on Thursday August 15 2019, @05:57PM

      by stretch611 (6199) on Thursday August 15 2019, @05:57PM (#880673)

      Part of it is to catch the people who sell my address to the spammers.

      But, also, as I mentioned, it catches when someone's system gets compromised. The "dropbox@mydomain.xxx" email address is constantly getting email forever... despite changing to a different email address for that registration years ago. But with an easy filter: Mark as SPAM ==> to-email = "dropbox@mydomain.xxx"

      While I do use a different password on each site. (and keep the password manager offline -- KeePassX ) No one will ever get into my online banking with a username of "facebook@mydomain.xxx" (while I deleted that facebook account over 10 years ago, I have no doubt it is still in facebook's databses.) And remember, just because you have it password protected, they can't even reset your password if they do not know the right email address.

      --
      Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
  • (Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday August 14 2019, @10:31AM (1 child)

    by looorg (578) on Wednesday August 14 2019, @10:31AM (#880059)

    I used the same provider now since the mid 90's (Dreamhost) and they offer all that. I can still run a website, db, and all that but I just removed all those things a few years ago after realizing that I really wasn't updating them anymore and it was more a tumbleweed site. Now it's mainly just email for the entire family and relatives. They offer a wide range of email options including setting up various catchall addresses. I don't think there is a limit to how many actual addresses or aliases or catchalls you can have, at least I have not reached it yet. You can run pop, imap for running whatever program you like or just use the web-interface they provide or if you want something specific you can just write and/or install your own.

    That said it does sound like something most providers would provide in the say $5-10 a month range. Is there a budget constraint per month?

    • (Score: 2) by stretch611 on Thursday August 15 2019, @06:00PM

      by stretch611 (6199) on Thursday August 15 2019, @06:00PM (#880676)

      That is similar to what happened with me. I had a full service provider that sold me a VPS to do with what I wanted. I ran some services like an SVN repo, mumble server, database, website and others. The only thing really being used right now is email. In the meantime, my ISP was bought (or merged. I'm not sure) they dropped their basic support to zero support, they increased and added fees and honestly, I just want to be rid of them(the ISP).

      Mumble pretty much isn't used anymore in favor of discord, or even the voip client built into Steam Chat.
      I pretty much do not need a publicly available database, and even the SVN repo isn't used as much and can be done locally at home now.
      Just like you, my website is just tumbleweeds now too.

      Budget matters, but seeing how I plan on leaving a $40/month full service ISP, I think it would be easy to lower my current spending a lot with the change to just email. (and based on other response, $5-10/month seems like a good replacement cost.)

      --
      Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @10:48AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @10:48AM (#880064)

    I've been using Runbox [runbox.com] for the last few years after using GMail since it started.

    I am not a fan of Runbox 7, their new snazzy webmail interface, but Runbox 6 does the job well.

    They do a 2 years for the price of 1 when you sign up, and have a free trial period.

    Price for the box I have is $99 for 3 years which was probably their December/January special for a Medium account.

    I reached the point where I am willing to pay for a reliable email service. I can't see myself leaving anytime soon.

  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @11:16AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @11:16AM (#880071)

    Anyone who says it's too much trouble can leave their geek card at the door.

    I just went through this. We had been using the free Gmail for our domain for years without any problem. But we just rebranded and with that came a new domain name. Of course the new domain name isn't grand-fathered in at Gmail and so it's no longer free. So either pay PER USER for Gmail or look elsewhere.

    A new linode (in Canada eh!) and these two tutorials did the trick.

    https://docs.slackware.com/howtos:network_services:postfix_dovecot_mysql [slackware.com]

    https://gerardozamudio.mx/2015/04/25/slackware-mail-server-with-mysql-postfix-and-dovecot/ [gerardozamudio.mx]

    Now I've got all you can eat users, domains, aliases. If you haven't tailed a logfile lately, turn your geek card in at the door!

  • (Score: 2) by SemperOSS on Wednesday August 14 2019, @11:19AM

    by SemperOSS (5072) on Wednesday August 14 2019, @11:19AM (#880072)

    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?
  • (Score: 2) by Appalbarry on Wednesday August 14 2019, @02:19PM (3 children)

    by Appalbarry (66) on Wednesday August 14 2019, @02:19PM (#880209) Journal

    After a decade or more of using Google for everything I've finally moved almost everything off of the G cloud.
    Most things now live in a Nextcloud instance, but email is with the services provided by my excellent, privacy oriented, great customer service oriented host EasyDNS.
    I have messed with email servers in the past, and fall into the camp that can't be bothered. Admittedly I do miss Gmail's excellent spam filtering.
    What did surprise was the near complete lack of standalone email clients that looked like they had been designed this century. I finally gave in and settled for Thunderbird, but wow, is it creaky. I honestly expected to find some new, zippy, totally modern client but came up with options that either had significant limitations or required the use of someone else's servers to work.
    I have though been happy with the default non-Gmail client on my Huawei phone though. Is that an Android app? Or Huawei's? I don't know, but it works just fine.
    I now have almost everyone transitioned from Gmail to new addresses, and as a bonus everything worked out of the box on a recent trip to China while everything Google was blackholed.

    • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Wednesday August 14 2019, @03:30PM (2 children)

      by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Wednesday August 14 2019, @03:30PM (#880270) Journal
      I see plenty of us dropped Gmail. That's one metric for how they are losing trust by competing to be the most evil.
      --
      SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @07:02PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @07:02PM (#880453)

        Add one more to the count... Can only take so much abuse, right?

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 15 2019, @01:36PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 15 2019, @01:36PM (#880564)

          The chat window for writing emails did it for me.
          This was before the privacy issues.

  • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday August 14 2019, @04:38PM

    by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday August 14 2019, @04:38PM (#880309) Homepage Journal

    I use exim on a computer in my living room after getting my ISP to provide a permanent email address. I read the mail with mutt.

    For spam, greylisting suffices to reduce it to a manageable amount.

    I've had to block one IP number that provided Chinese spam in such quantity that I had to page through hundreds of to me unreadable characters to get to each real message.

    That's over something like a decade or two.

    Often now I access mutt over a ssh -X connection. I like that mutt never shows me an HTML message in a browser unless I explicitly ask it to.

  • (Score: 2) by chewbacon on Wednesday August 14 2019, @06:13PM

    by chewbacon (1032) on Wednesday August 14 2019, @06:13PM (#880414)

    I'm working on this in the minority of my spare time. Reverse VPN via Lightsail to get around the port restrictions. Dovecot, Postfix, Spamassassin, and mysql. Not sure if I want to do it full time for my domain or not, so once things are up and running it'll be for low priority stuff. GMail is admittedly nice, but there is the evil concerns with them. I'm convinced Outlook configures their spam filter backwards - spam to the inbox, ham to the spam.

  • (Score: 1) by jman on Thursday August 15 2019, @03:10PM

    by jman (6085) Subscriber Badge on Thursday August 15 2019, @03:10PM (#880610) Homepage

    These days I'm down to just the one "real" address (well, two, if you count the one my mobile devices use), and let aliases for all the domains under my control feed into it. Using throw-away addresses is a great way to track spam, and owning your own domain(s) makes it super easy as you can set the user portion of the email address to whatever you want. (Just make sure to set the alias up in your MTA.)

    You may be able to get away with Linode's smallest plan, $5/mo. IIRC, inbound traffic is free so you'd only be paying for bandwidth on outgoing mail, and at the $5 rate you get 1TB per month. That's a lot of email.

    There are also shared hosts, but their downside is if another customer hogs too much resource, your performance may suffer. Then again, if all you're doing is email it'd be hard to bring you completely down. With places like Linode and Digital Ocean, you're guaranteed a certain amount of resources (RAM, CPU, storage, etc.) for what you pay.

    Managed hosting (where they'd set up and maintain the services you'd need) is a fairly expensive up-sell at Linode, so you'd have to roll your own Exim (for email), Bind (to manage DNS on your domains, unless you let the registrar handle that), httpd/nginx (for a webmail GUI), sshd (for remote access to manage the space), etc., but that's the cheapest option.

    Upside is total control over your bit. Downside is having to call yourself for repairs if something breaks.

    There's also cPanel, a paid set of scripts that make managing all that pretty easy via a GUI, but they charge at least $15 or so a month, so now you're up to nearly $250 / year, plus domain renewal cost.

    If a paid solution like cPanel is not what you want, there are free solutions (Webmin, etc.), but free means more work on your end, so more chance to bork the system, which means more calls to yourself for repair and no email until it gets fixed.

    While it's still possible to break things with cPanel, they've fine-tuned their stuff over the years so it's pretty stable. Part of what you're paying for is security patches. They recommend a CentOS distro, which is one Linode supports.. If you don't go fiddling with they have under the hood (i.e., shelling in and saying "Hmmm, what happens if I sudo rm -rf this directory?"), you should be fine.

    I've been a Linode customer for about ten years now, and overall things have been pretty smooth. They have a referral system for account credit but as I'm more informing than shilling, am not posting that here.

    Good luck!

  • (Score: 1) by lcall on Friday August 16 2019, @10:03PM (1 child)

    by lcall (4611) on Friday August 16 2019, @10:03PM (#881300)

    For exactly what the original poster describes, pair.com and affiliated services seem to work very well. (no connection except satisfied customer). Their prices are good, I have got no nonsense from them and excellent support when needed, for many years now. There are probably others like them, but they have been more than satisfactory.

    (I gather from the misc@openbsd.org list, than running an email server for oneself isn't hard, but doing a good job of it in the complex and changing email landscape can take many hours of study and ongoing learning & maintenance.)

    - - -
    Things i would like to say to many:
    http://lukecall.net [lukecall.net]

    • (Score: 1) by lcall on Friday August 16 2019, @10:07PM

      by lcall (4611) on Friday August 16 2019, @10:07PM (#881303)

      (Oops: typo edit to 2nd paragraph: s/than/that/ )

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