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.
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.
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 :)
Chobbes@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Glad it was helpful! I was worried I’d be a little off-topic talking about self-hosting e-mail instead of this Anon Addy thing. Hope you find a solution that works for you soon :).
And yeah… Unfortunately if you you’re behind CGNAT and don’t have a static IP I think doing this for free on your existing internet connection might be challenging. One thing that people in a similar position might be interested in is Hurricane Electric’s free Tunnelbroker service, but I think you might still be out of luck behind CGNAT.
You’ll be able to get public IPv6 addresses for free and can allocate them to your home network. You can set it up to dynamically update the IPv4 address on your end… But I think if you’re behind CGNAT you can’t do that, unfortunately. Another problem with this approach for something like a mail server is that not everything speaks IPv6… If a sender only supports IPv4 they won’t be able to send mail to you.
I think behind CGNAT pretty much your only option is to pay somebody for a real IP somewhere. Either a VPS somewhere where you set up wireguard (there are cheap options for this, and then you can run other things on the machine), or a VPN with a dedicated IP.
MonkCanatella@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
I was considering a VPS! That said, if I’m say, accessing my jellyfin library externally through a VPS, wouldn’t that just end up costing ludicrous amounts of money?_