Comment on Piggybacking off the selfhosting email post earlier, does anyone have experience self hosting anon addy?

• Chobbes@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Relays do cost money, though I think some have a free tier for small volumes of mail. You might also see if your registrar or host provides anything for email.

  The easiest way to do this is to start with just receiving email and not worrying about forwarding, though. You can host your own imap server and just have a catchall account that’s separate from your main email to start, and if you really want to forward you can worry about send later. Receiving email is easy, the thing that people struggle with for email is sending because there are a few requirements like dkim / spf / DMARC and reverse dns that you might not know about and may configure incorrectly and feedback is hard. Also if you have a residential ip I’ve heard it can be harder to send too. If you’re just forwarding to yourself, though, that’s probably a little easier because you can test more easily / mark yourself not spam. If this is your use case I wouldn’t worry about setting up a paid relay service. You don’t need it unless you really want to forward and have troubles making send work in your own.

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  • MonkCanatella@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I’m behind a double nat and my ip situation is liable to change. I finally got duckduckemail working. So far it’s free but you never know when the enshittification will begin. It seems unlimited but who knows, maybe it’s a hidden limit. I may have to look into awsses or something like that and see if I can set up catchall as well. That would probably be better because with ddg email it’s a random string for the email address, so I’d have to cross reference with my bitward setup if I started getting spammed. With a catchall I should be able to just set the email to @myemail.com. I just think with my ISP situation, self hosting email server would probably not work too well. It could also really screw me over if my NAS loses power or something

    Do you have any knowledge on services that will let me use my domain as a catchall but use their servers for emails? I’ve done some very light research but am not familiar whether this setup would be even possible in the first place.

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    • Chobbes@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Oh god, yeah. I personally would not try to self host e-mail or any service that you need other people to be able to reliably connect to without a static IP. As to losing power… In theory mail servers are supposed to queue mail and resend later, and you can also set up a backup MX that will queue mail for you (senders will automatically switch to the backup mail server if they cannot connect to your primary one). There are even free services for backup MX junkemailfilter.com/…/free_mx_backup_service.html (though they use this to train spam filters, so if you have privacy concerns you may want to avoid it). In the past I have had some prolonged downtime on my mail server and I have noticed that some senders will give up entirely and never send to that address anymore (which I think is poor form on their part, especially since somebody could register that email account later). I’ve since setup my own backup MX to avoid these issues, and it’s worked great when my primary has had network issues (needed a spare box for backup nameserver and stuff anyway, haha).

      You absolutely can use an external mail service as a catchall with your own domain. For instance protonmail has support for this:

      proton.me/support/catch-all

      You’d have to look into the pricing and read the fine print, though. A lot of mail providers charge per inbox and I’m not sure if they’d charge extra for catchall services or not.

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      • MonkCanatella@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Appreciate your input :)

        Proton mail allows catchall with a paid plan, the least expensive of which is about $4/mo. They have an excellent reputation. But then there’s fastmail which is like, all of this batteries included, including bitwarden integration for auto creating the email aliases. And it’s cheaper. Well, guess I’ve got some research to do. Thanks for the guidance, you’re really helpful :)

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