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A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

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Best free/cheap web host for DIY email (aussie.zone)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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cross-posted from: https://aussie.zone/post/3212910

Hi all,

I have had several shots at self hosting email over the years and my last attempt failed due to my home IP being in a dynamic pool. I thought I might try again, this time with a basic web hosting provider that I could set up email on. Any suggestions for a free/cheap provider with decent uptime?

Thanks

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I encourage homelabers to set up email servers and to play with them. Doing all of that will help a lot and you will learn a lot for sure.

It’s mostly the bureaucratic stuff that’s the killer here I think. Without putting in an effort to do the constant spam list appeals you can never be confident that your email makes it into people’s inboxes. Sure you could test with Gmail, but you can’t test for all of the smaller email hosting providers that mostly use a combination of spam assassin and spam lists.

Without confidence I don’t think it would be wise to use email in “production”. If you only use email to receive notifications it might make sense to self host. But if you need to reliably, timely, and confidently send out messages the downsides of self hosting are rough.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

For what it’s worth, this has not been my experience after self hosting my email for nearly a decade. It has not been a constant battle at all… it has just worked, and I get responses whenever mailing random people all the time and have not had delivery issues to my knowledge. That said, I have talked to people who have had issues and every time there has been something wrong with their configuration (usually DKIM or rDNS is not set up properly). There’s enough that can go wrong that I wouldn’t recommend people send important emails with it unless they’ve been doing it for a while and they’re sure it’s working, but in my experience this is all fear mongering. Self hosting your email is very doable and is generally not a constant battle against getting put in the spam slammer. There’s a lot of picky little things to set up at first, but once it’s set up it’s usually fine.