Is POP email still a thing?

Submitted ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨eyesaremosaics@lemmy.zip⁩ to ⁨selfhosted@lemmy.world⁩

I’m tempted to move to email with my own domain, but don’t really care about the server side of things, I guess I’m following the line that self hosted email is not easy to do, and not sure how reliable I can make my servers.

The other option is to have some other system do the email hosting, and if it is through my domain then there should be no issues with moving around if needed. Hosting all the email archive isn’t really needed either, I’d be fine self hosting or storing the archive.

Is there a set up where some remote service handles email exchange, and you just sync with it eg through POP style interfaces? Id actually prefer if my own server was doing the sync rather than a desktop running Thunderbird etc, that way it is kind of self hosted but also robust to down time. What’s the best practice along these lines?

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balasted@mbin.linuxnation.social ⁨41⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
I did this a few years back and chose to host, for now, with migadu. They have imap, pop, and a web interface. I use POP myself, because I prefer to house my data.

Client-wise, I use mutt and download messages with mpop, which is a snap to compile if your distro doesn't have a package.

I have no complaints. This setup is flexible and simple.

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CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
POP isn’t sync; pop downloads all the messages locally and you tell the server what to do with them once they’re downloaded.

The result is that you have your messages on your device. But when you go to another device, it’s a different set of messages with different read status.

Unless something has changed, that’s how it worked last time I used POP and that’s why everyone used IMAP now that there’s multiple devices (phones, laptops) in play.

You’re right about self hosting email; it’s a pain.

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- Reannlegge@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  I used IMAP with my ISP, I had a technical question about something and the tech worker bee was surprised that they still offered IMAP as everything for the worker bees end had been moved to exchange. I read up on it after the chit chat and it appeared they where looking at transitioning everyone over to exchange in the coming years, so I created an away message to my ISP mail, forwarding stuff from there to one aand address at my domains IMAP server full time slowly adding things to the do not forward list.
  
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Reannlegge@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
POP needs to die a painful death, in the year 2026 when you have multiple devices POP is not the answer, IMAP is the way. Sure you can self host your own email, but you will either need a static IP at home or a VPS with a static IP, than you need to make sure either one is cool with you hosting your email through there. You will need more than a week to figure things out and by the end of the week you will have pulled out all of your hair, I stopped trying going into a few days!

My suggestion however is to get someone else to host your email, the company that hosts my domain name and my VPS also hosts my email. I think I got 4 addresses with them but they have a wildcard option so that I can have infinite email address; so I can block things if they get spammy, I no longer want to see them, I no longer use their services, or I want a longer free trial which I may have done 2 or 3 times.

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corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
POPs has a place as a protocol, even today. IMAPs is the norm but the right job needs the right tool.

MAPI is trash.

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lemmyvore@feddit.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
You can do what you want with IMAP too.

I use isync, it’s a CLI tool that can sync between IMAP accounts or between IMAP and local plain storage and it has the option to delete messages over a certain age after it copies them.

Is there a set up where some remote service handles email exchange, and you just sync with it

Any regular email provider can do this as long as it offers IMAP. I use email clients with my provider’s IMAP but I also use isync on the server to periodically pull all email locally and delete messages older than 30 days. I’ve also installed a local private IMAP server and a private webmail client on top of that private IMAP, which I use to search through old emails.

This way I normally use the “live” mailbox with my PC/mobile devices, and use the private webmail when I need to search for anything over 30 days old.

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victorz@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
What about JMAP, guys? Is that cool?

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- ArborNode@lemmy.shutes.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  One of the reasons I decided to self host email was specifically to use jmap.
  
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  - victorz@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
    Really! Tell me more about it, if you want! I’m excited to learn. 😊
    
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irotsoma@piefed.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Pop is download only (and optionally delete on server when downloaded), IMAP is sync so read states, moves, deletes, etc., will sync to the server and between all clients.

But both exist still, just most email providers want you to leave your email on their servers so they can charge you for storage, scan it for advertising, etc., and most people want the state to sync across devices, so a lot of places just don’t implement it anymore and just allow either web-only or IMAP-only (usually paid since they don’t get to show you ads).

And yes you can set up a local software to download email from another server offering POP or IMAP and then either use a client application or self hosted web application to view them. This is not too common so it might be harder to find instructions, but it’s doable.

Which part are you concerned with. The biggest issue with email servers is trust. Many companies will refuse to connect to your SMTP server to send you emails or reject your emails your SMTP server is sending to them if you aren’t on a whitelist or if your IP address has been used for spamming in the past and it’s on a black list. The easiest way to get around this is to subscribe to an SMTP proxy service.

The other issue you may find will happen no matter if you selfhost or not. When using a custom domain, some servers have whitelists of domains in addition to IP addresses and if you aren’t on it they will silently reject emails you send or that they were supposed to send to you. I have a couple of places (health care and financial companies mostly) who do this, so I have to use gmail, which ironically means the email is less secure, especially with Google’s recent changes in policy about reading your emails.

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Zak@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Yes, but IMAP is more common. I’ve been using Maddy for years, and it’s a fairly low-effort solution.

The fussy part in the modern era is DNS setup to ensure other providers accept mail from you, but that’s a one-time step.

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Treczoks@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
POP and IMAP are still alive.

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ArborNode@lemmy.shutes.org ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
The difficulty of self hosting your own email is high, but if you aim to do it, i would recommend Stalwart for self hosting. POP is not what you want as other people are saying. There is also a newer protocal to IMAP called JMAP.

Some things to consider are your inbound and outbound mail paths.

For incoming: Do you have a VPS to be your entry point? Or do you plan to port forward (assuming you even can given the prevalence of CGNAT)? There is also a way to teach a web worker like the kind cloudflare let’s you use for free to break the email down and POST it to a listener in your server across a tunnel and the listener can put it back together into an email at your server and drop it off. That being the only way I have found to get inbound mail behind a double NAT (CGNAT) without a VPS.

For outbound, if you send stuff to major SMTP providers from a residential IP they will block it or mark as spam pretty heavily. You may want to consider a relay to make sure people actually see what you send. Brevo has a free tier, SMTP2Go is solid. There are others as well.

There are other considerations like how will the end user interact with the mail server? I host a Bulwark instance and really love what they are doing with the project, but there are quite a few options for that.

If you end up giving it a go, good luck, and know that it is possible!

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NoLemurs@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
You can use imapsync to keep a local synced copy your email in maildir format. That, along with a domain you own, solves the “I own my own email sycned to my server” problem pretty much completely. Switching email providers is just syncing to the new server (which imapsync supports).

Some email clients (like aerc) can just operate on the maildir directly. That’s what I do, but there are lots of ways to do this.

One option is to just keep using your email client the way you are now talking directly to your mailserver, and just rely on the imapsync side to be your owned backup/migration path.

Alternatively you can run your own local IMAP or POP server like Dovecot backed by the local maildir. So that’s imapsync -> dovecot -> thunderbird (or similar). It’s a little more software to set up, but once it’s set up it should be very reliable and gives you total control over what email client you use and full ownership of your data.

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- eyesaremosaics@lemmy.zip ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Thanks, that sounds useful.
  
  Do you know of a self hosted webmail interface that has good features? So I guess that would run on the self hosted mail archive after imapsync.
  
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  - NoLemurs@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    I don’t have any personal experience with self hosted webmail. I know there are a bunch out there and definitely both options that can sit in front of a maildir and options that can sit in front of a POP/IMAP server like Dovecot.
    
    I did a little googling, and if I wanted to set this up, the first thing I’d check out is something like imapsync -> dovecot -> Roundcube.
    
    Dovecot provides a really reliable maildir -> IMAP/POP conversion layer, and once you’ve got that, most things should work.
    
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AbidingOhmsLaw@lemmy.ml ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
You can have a hosted e-mail system with your own domain, many service providers will do this. They would have the storage, archive, etc. on their servers. Access would be a web client, e-mail client of your choice, or a bridge demon. Option 2 is a hosted vertual server, so your self hosting but renting a VM server on a providers data center, they take care of the hardware, power, backup (sometimes depending on service), etc. You would set up your OS and e-mail services.

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brickfrog@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

Is there a set up where some remote service handles email exchange, and you just sync with it eg through POP style interfaces?

Yup, that’s signing up for a email provider. I wouldn’t call that self hosting since you’re just referring to email client software on your end to store the emails that are being synchronized at the email provider’s server(s).

IMAP is sync so that might be what you meant. POP is even older but that’s for downloading only. And SMTP is for sending.

Those all still exist, most paid email providers still offer them just make sure to check before signing up.

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surewhynotlem@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
It depends what you mean by sync. There are plenty of services that will host your email server and you just connect via IMAP from all the clients.

But if you mean sync to an archive, look into openarchiver.

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