after looking into selfhosting email it seems to me that it’s probably better if I use an existing email hoster like Namecheap or Porkbun.
Now I saw that Porkbun doesn’t offer catchall emails so I can’t use it for my usecase.
Do you guys have any recommendations for a reasonably priced email hoster for a custom domain that offers all basic features like catchall? The purpose is for one domain I use for my personal stuff and one for a small side hustle/ small business.
ProtonMail has been my go to, really fantastic service, you get simplelogin as well and can add custom domains up to 10 iirc. And the VPN is top tier too.
I already posted that I recommend fastmail elsewhere in this thread, but you raised so many good points that it reminded me of some extra points :)
Fastmail offers granular, per-app passwords – I have a single password which has read-only access to IMAP in order to back up all the data on a timer. This feature is missing from many (many) other email providers - using the 80/20 rule, if they even offer it it’s a single password with full access (Mailfence, for example)
Since this community is about selfhosting I think it’s worth pointing out that this is AMAZING for selfhosting. I have all me selfhosted services sending e-mail via fastmail’s SMTP. With per-app passwords I don’t need to store my normal e-mail password and the apps can be limited to SMTP only (so no read access). And in case of compromise you can revoke permissions on a per-app granularity.
Fastmail offers full CardDAV (contacts) and CalDAV (calendar) access, which makes plugging it into any other app that supports this very easy - their DNS wizard helps you set up the service records. I use “DavX5” on my Android to sync all Contacts and Calendar outside of using the Fastmail app (which is a self contained app on Android, it’s not too bad)
Fastmail has become my contacts app now - it’s really great to have all your e-mail and contacts in the same place. The contacts don’t even need to have an e-mail address - I have a lot of contacts stored for whom I only have a phone number. I sync to android using the same DavX5 app and then immediately have these contacts in whatsapp and signal.
I have a couple domains that are very low volume for outgoing mail. I use Migadu. I’m happy with their cheapest tier ($19/year for both domains). They have catch-alls and many other nice features.
Edit: They have no hard limits on the number of addresses, users, or domains and such. They just want you to be reasonable. You choose a tier based on your average quantity of outgoing mails per day. Again, there are no hard limits; they won’t cut you off unless you abuse the system.
I’ve been happy as well with migadu for the time I’ve been using it ~3 years. Have different mailboxes, and I used aliases for pretty much every website I sign up with.
Proton and fastmail you can use custom domains. I only have experience using fastmail. They provide great instructions for the settings in cloudflare (mx records, etc). My domain is purchased through namecheap.
As a single user or small household setup - I’m using Cloudflare email routing, with catchall, forwarded into my Gmail account for receive. For SMTP, I’m using a combination of mailjet.com and brevo.com, which both have fairly robust free tiers for personal/small business use and allow sending from anything@domain.com.
Funny 😄 pretty much asked myself the same thing, the day before yesterday.
Specifically, I have been looking for encrypted mail hosters supporting your own domain.
Also, hosting in Europe on dedicated Hardware (or at least guaranteed European VPS), GDPR compliance and some sort of certification/ verification of the said requirements and their claims!
What I came up with:
mailbox.org (never heard of it before, but pretty much has your requirements covered) <- Tor nodes, anonymous accounts(no personal data at all!)
proton mail
Tutanota (pretty young - but interesting concept)
I won’t cite their individual plans - that’s for you to figure out in detail.
The thing that bugs me with the Proton Mail and Tutanota, to effectively make use of their threat model/ encryption you have to use their Apps/ Software.
EDIT: I’m currently using Microsoft365 - with it you are pretty much locked in - I fear with Proton or Tutanota it’s the same. Migrating is a pain.
I’m trying mailbox.org at the moment - they got a 30-free trail.
Proton mail offers catchall, assuming you mean what I think you do. Basically I can receive mail sent to anything@mydomain.com, though my account only has 5 named accounts that I can send from.
Microsoft365. It’s like $6/user/month and you get access to the whole MS suite (Word, Excel, etc.). Email is managed by Exchange Online. Crème de la crop as far as email goes.
If you’re in the Apple ecosystem and just want something barebones then you can use a custom domain with your iCloud account. I think it’s called iCloud+.
I’ve been using Tutanota. They are kind of similar in principles to Protonmail, but until recently were dirt cheap at €12/yr (now €36/yr). The only “drawback” is that you can only access your mail through their app, this is a feature, not a bug, according to Tutao.
Whatever hosting service you’re going to use, if you’re not afraid of a little bit of Lua coding, consider using imapfilter – it’s a swiss knife for backups, pre-sorting, hooks and migration.
imapfilter is a (criminally underrated, IMO) tool for writing e-mail rules in Lua, which allow you to do tons of things, but my favorite is migrating e-mail, regardless of account.
See, unlike most filtering/sorting systems which are either completely proprietary or limited to single account (exportable as Sieve, if you’re lucky), imapfilter does not care where each “end” of the rule is: you can write rule that migrates from account1/folder1 to account2/folder3.
This allows you to completely decouple any sorting, pre-processing, hook or backup system from the actual locations or providers you happen to be using, as well as it allows you to combine any number of locations in any simple or complex way you need. Whatever system you will end up creating will stay with you as long (as you can use IMAP locations), so you can really focus on making it work long-term and have it fit into the big picture.
I’ve been using it for almost 10 years and ever since it has changed my whole world of e-mail. I have constant set of rules that take e-mails from set of inboxes (each box for different purpose, each on different provider, for reasons) and sort them to folders on my “actual” account, where I get to read them on my terms. I also have several of rules that run custom scripts exporting CSV’s, etc. (The rules are Lua programs, after all, so sky is the limit.) If I ever need to migrate my domain to another service (believe it or not, happened more than once in 10 years), all I need to do is set up the new account as base for the rules, but all of my rules are always going to be preserved.
In my past work I actually used imapfilter to move all IMAP from company Gmail to a locally maintained (on company laptop) Dovecot instance so that I could eventually use a sane client to get my work done. (And because the instance was local, I could access my e-mail offline with best possible speed.) One could do a similar thing with personal/freelance e-mail – just run Dovecot somewhere at a trusted place (you won’t be sending/receiving e-mails here, you will be only using IMAP to IMAP commands, so none of the horrors of self-hosting e-mail apply) and use imapfilter to route all email there, then back up your dovecot folder and you’re all set.
Except for need of coding, the disadvantage is that, I need an independent machine that runs 24/7 in order to keep sorting the e-mail (I do it cron-based but you can also do it continually) but that has not been a problem for me as I’m the self-hosting-nerd that’s going to have such machine anyway.
choose where you will host your “actual” e-mail, let’s say you choose according to best spam filter.
choose where you will store your e-mail long-term.
choose where you will access the e-mail for everyday use (this could be several separate accounts if you wanted to eg. use one on your phone and another one on your workstation)
choose where you will run imapfilter and any script hooks
start building your rules.
1-3 could be same provider or different providers, including your custom dovecot instance, you will simply choose based on convenience and limits. If you ever need to change one of the endpoints (providers), you just need to rewrite them in your ~/.imapfilter/config.lua. (And migrate, which can be done using imapfilter or manually using any sane client, eg. Claws Mail…)
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What about Microsoft 365? The tenant itself is free and per account and month you pay about 5-10$ (depending on sibscription level).
With this you have the full MS Exchange experience, you get 1TB of OneDrive space and all the shebang.
ProtonMail has been my go to, really fantastic service, you get simplelogin as well and can add custom domains up to 10 iirc. And the VPN is top tier too.
I have Protonmail rolled together with AnonAddy and that gives me all the aliases I could ever want.
deleted by creator
I already posted that I recommend fastmail elsewhere in this thread, but you raised so many good points that it reminded me of some extra points :)
Since this community is about selfhosting I think it’s worth pointing out that this is AMAZING for selfhosting. I have all me selfhosted services sending e-mail via fastmail’s SMTP. With per-app passwords I don’t need to store my normal e-mail password and the apps can be limited to SMTP only (so no read access). And in case of compromise you can revoke permissions on a per-app granularity.
Fastmail has become my contacts app now - it’s really great to have all your e-mail and contacts in the same place. The contacts don’t even need to have an e-mail address - I have a lot of contacts stored for whom I only have a phone number. I sync to android using the same DavX5 app and then immediately have these contacts in whatsapp and signal.
I have a couple domains that are very low volume for outgoing mail. I use Migadu. I’m happy with their cheapest tier ($19/year for both domains). They have catch-alls and many other nice features.
Edit: They have no hard limits on the number of addresses, users, or domains and such. They just want you to be reasonable. You choose a tier based on your average quantity of outgoing mails per day. Again, there are no hard limits; they won’t cut you off unless you abuse the system.
Seconding Migadu! I’ve had them for about 3 years now and never had a problem.
I’ve been happy as well with migadu for the time I’ve been using it ~3 years. Have different mailboxes, and I used aliases for pretty much every website I sign up with.
Purelymail.com has been great for me for years. Insanely cheap and just works.
It’s great, I just wish the admin UI was better somehow. Especially the routing page quickly gets out of hand.
I use Proton mail and Anonaddy.
Proton and fastmail you can use custom domains. I only have experience using fastmail. They provide great instructions for the settings in cloudflare (mx records, etc). My domain is purchased through namecheap.
I can receive mail on *@mydomain.com and I can send email from any thing I want ad-hoc (anything@mydomain.com or anything@anything.mydomain.com)
I thought about selfhosting as well, but the internet concensus was it can be a hassle with your email getting rejected.
Not self-hosted, however Proton supports custom domains and catch-all. Their monthly plans are very reasonable IMO.
Mailbox.org is decent as well
As a single user or small household setup - I’m using Cloudflare email routing, with catchall, forwarded into my Gmail account for receive. For SMTP, I’m using a combination of mailjet.com and brevo.com, which both have fairly robust free tiers for personal/small business use and allow sending from anything@domain.com.
Funny 😄 pretty much asked myself the same thing, the day before yesterday.
Specifically, I have been looking for encrypted mail hosters supporting your own domain. Also, hosting in Europe on dedicated Hardware (or at least guaranteed European VPS), GDPR compliance and some sort of certification/ verification of the said requirements and their claims!
What I came up with:
I won’t cite their individual plans - that’s for you to figure out in detail.
The thing that bugs me with the Proton Mail and Tutanota, to effectively make use of their threat model/ encryption you have to use their Apps/ Software. EDIT: I’m currently using Microsoft365 - with it you are pretty much locked in - I fear with Proton or Tutanota it’s the same. Migrating is a pain.
I’m trying mailbox.org at the moment - they got a 30-free trail.
Proton mail offers catchall, assuming you mean what I think you do. Basically I can receive mail sent to anything@mydomain.com, though my account only has 5 named accounts that I can send from.
Microsoft365. It’s like $6/user/month and you get access to the whole MS suite (Word, Excel, etc.). Email is managed by Exchange Online. Crème de la crop as far as email goes.
If you’re in the Apple ecosystem and just want something barebones then you can use a custom domain with your iCloud account. I think it’s called iCloud+.
I am already paying for iCloud+ so I use their service with my domain. It gets the job done.
I’ve been using Tutanota. They are kind of similar in principles to Protonmail, but until recently were dirt cheap at €12/yr (now €36/yr). The only “drawback” is that you can only access your mail through their app, this is a feature, not a bug, according to Tutao.
Whatever hosting service you’re going to use, if you’re not afraid of a little bit of Lua coding, consider using
imapfilter– it’s a swiss knife for backups, pre-sorting, hooks and migration.imapfilter is a (criminally underrated, IMO) tool for writing e-mail rules in Lua, which allow you to do tons of things, but my favorite is migrating e-mail, regardless of account.
See, unlike most filtering/sorting systems which are either completely proprietary or limited to single account (exportable as Sieve, if you’re lucky), imapfilter does not care where each “end” of the rule is: you can write rule that migrates from account1/folder1 to account2/folder3.
This allows you to completely decouple any sorting, pre-processing, hook or backup system from the actual locations or providers you happen to be using, as well as it allows you to combine any number of locations in any simple or complex way you need. Whatever system you will end up creating will stay with you as long (as you can use IMAP locations), so you can really focus on making it work long-term and have it fit into the big picture.
I’ve been using it for almost 10 years and ever since it has changed my whole world of e-mail. I have constant set of rules that take e-mails from set of inboxes (each box for different purpose, each on different provider, for reasons) and sort them to folders on my “actual” account, where I get to read them on my terms. I also have several of rules that run custom scripts exporting CSV’s, etc. (The rules are Lua programs, after all, so sky is the limit.) If I ever need to migrate my domain to another service (believe it or not, happened more than once in 10 years), all I need to do is set up the new account as base for the rules, but all of my rules are always going to be preserved.
In my past work I actually used imapfilter to move all IMAP from company Gmail to a locally maintained (on company laptop) Dovecot instance so that I could eventually use a sane client to get my work done. (And because the instance was local, I could access my e-mail offline with best possible speed.) One could do a similar thing with personal/freelance e-mail – just run Dovecot somewhere at a trusted place (you won’t be sending/receiving e-mails here, you will be only using IMAP to IMAP commands, so none of the horrors of self-hosting e-mail apply) and use imapfilter to route all email there, then back up your dovecot folder and you’re all set.
Except for need of coding, the disadvantage is that, I need an independent machine that runs 24/7 in order to keep sorting the e-mail (I do it cron-based but you can also do it continually) but that has not been a problem for me as I’m the self-hosting-nerd that’s going to have such machine anyway.
Again, perhaps with more clarity:
With imapfilter you can
1-3 could be same provider or different providers, including your custom dovecot instance, you will simply choose based on convenience and limits. If you ever need to change one of the endpoints (providers), you just need to rewrite them in your ~/.imapfilter/config.lua. (And migrate, which can be done using imapfilter or manually using any sane client, eg. Claws Mail…)