Trying to de-google and looking for an alternative to Gmail.
Don’t mind if it’s a paid service if it’s robust.
Anything? Carrier pigeon?
Outlook
You can always pay for your own mailserver. I personally like it that people can reach me a hello@firstnamelastname.de. Maybe it is something for you?
Do you actually host your own mail? Because everyone tells me not to do that, it’s too much of a hassle and that there are mail services where I can use my own domain.
I used to host my own mail server. Getting it up and running with iredmail wasn’t too difficult, but maintaining all of the different components and setting up spam filters and autodiscover and stuff like that is an absolute nightmare.
I just use proton mail. I can point my dns to them, and they do everything else for me.
Only downside is that they don’t expose pop3 or imap, so you have to either use their app, or set up their bridge and host that locally.
If you just buy the office 365 service through a domain provider its as simple as a few clicks. Namecheap charges me $6 a year for my domain and $5 a month for an Office 365 mailbox with 5 users. It was a few clicks and it was set up, and I can log into the Office interface to manage the accounts. If you are running your own SMTP server from your home, yes, it can be extra steps. But that’s just silly if you can afford a cloud hosted email.
I’ve had something like that for a decade and a half now.
In fact the basic e-mail service came free with just getting a domain name (though I pay extra to get IMAP rather that just POP3 access for my mail client plus pretty much infinite storage).
Works in any e-mail client and also has a web client.
Notice that I don’t even need to have a hosting account (so it’s not hosting for a website), much less a full VPS (which I would have to manage myself): all I’m paying for is the domain name and a little extra for more storage and full e-mail protocol support beyond the basic tier.
I think there have been maybe 2 or 3 outtages in the entire decade and half I’ve had it.
Whilst I could do my own thing and manage it, this solution is pretty much the level of complexity of using Google Mail (I have more important things to spend my time on than manage a mailserver) with infinitelly more privacy and running 100% on open protocols (so I can move it to a different provider if I want).
Not for everyone, but self-hosting isn’t so bad.
Question about self hosting a mail server at home - if my internet goes out at home, all mail sent to me during the outage would be undeliverable, right?
For a paid host, what would be a reliable and cheap option?
If your email server is offline then mail won’t be delivered. The sender’s server will retry as other have noted, but how often and how many times varies. Hosting at home, even when possible, is not a great idea in my opinion.
There are endless options for hosting out there, I don’t want to name names since I only really have experience with one.
You usually can’t fully self-host a mail server (like literally in your house) because most residential ISPs block port 25 to prevent spam/abuse. You can use a third party relay service like what Helm offered, but most people “self host” via a cloud provider or a web host.
Gotta go for ProtonMail. Have been running it for a year and I kinda like how it’s doing.
An additional feature is SimpleLogin’s “Hide My E-mail” Aliases, which are “burner” e-mail addresses to use with pre-determined SimpleLogin domains (you can add your own domains as well to go around Proton’s custom domain limit). Those are included in the full suite and Family subscriptions. (10 a month when subscribing for a year)
There’s also a cheaper variant for 3.50 a month but it lacks the SimpleLogin feature. You can get SimpleLogin seperately for 30 a year, however.
