This Microsoft outage being the last drop in the bucket, I’m looking to get my email/calendar/contacts somewhere under my control.

As I already self-host a number of things (e.g. my Linux ISO collection), and have services exposed to the internet, it would make sense to run it at home.

After all, it’s not heavy lifting. It’s not hosting 500+ mailboxes for 100+ people. It’s just little old me, with a handful of domains, catch-all receiving and a few dedicated sending addresses.

However email is a bit more mission critical than my smarthome control or self hosted LLMs. Downtime could be critically bad, and I still don’t trust my home setup to be truly 99.999999% available.

I don’t mind paying for a service but if I do I’d prefer something European, given I’m based in the UK (and otherwise am an EU citizen).

I’m really curious how y’all solve it. I guess I’m interested in some kind of hybrid solution where there’s my own server and a hosted service, latter which acts as a backup solution, but still fully synced, so if my internet or power goes out (or my server goes down), I can still get mail sent and delivered.

So I’m not only just interested in the stack you run for email but the entire infrastructure, especially if you’ve solved this sort of off-site fallback service.

  • tremble5218@programming.devEnglish
    1·
    15 hours ago

    You don’t specifically have to use SimpleLogin. I only suggested it because I use it. You could use a number of other services like AnonAddy, Forward Email, Firefox Relay, etc. for aliases. For email hosting, you could choose any provider of your choosing, doesn’t have to be a mega corp.

    Hosting your email servers comes with a lot of administrative overhead like maintaining availability, reputation, certificates, quotas, DNS entries, DKIM, DMARC and SPF, etc. If you’re willing to go that route, then Mail-in-a-box is a good way to do it. There are some other options here that you can look at too - https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#communication---email---complete-solutions

    If you happen to successfully run your own mail server, please do report back and tell us your experience.