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.
What all is down from Microslop?
For Calendar/Contacts I use baikal. I thought about hosting my own email because my host really had me over the coals for what I was doing with it, I started researching and thought it could be fun. I bought a throwaway domain and had one of my static IPs setup for the port 25 being opened up I spent a week trying to do things, most of the Lemmy posts I found and most of the personal things like blogs I was looking for said do not self host your own email.
My previous host was HostHero, they did not have a wildcard email function so I needed to buy the unlimited email package because I do not use the same email address or password for anything. My new host, easyDNS, does offer a wildcard option so I can have unlimitted email addresses.
Why do I use a a different email address for everything? I can just close an account once I no longer use the service or once they start getting spammy, I get next to no spam.
I am not a EU citizen, I am Canadian! So when Trump came in and did his whole 51st state BS I jumped on the boycott Amarica train fast so the Apple services I was paying for stopped, one of which was hide my email so I got Proton, I found out the CEO was a simp for Trump so I was going to host my own and as I said I discovered it is not a simple thing even if I was going to do just one email address.
But I strongly do suggest find a host in the EU, that offers a wildcard option. All though it sounds like you have a good handle on things email is something else.
I use Zoho Mail with my own domain for really important stuff, like invoices and such, and my own Postfix + Dovecot + Roundcube (with multiple domains) for everything non-essential
I host a mailcow instance. Had some issues getting the IP address the VPS assigned me removed from some blacklists, and some companies whitelist email domains and only let you get their emails if you use outlook, gmail, etc., but those are few. Unfortunately it’s often medical stuff that thinks they’re being “secure” by only sending mail to systems that steal your private data for profit, but not much you can do. And that happens with any email software if you use your own domain as your email address.
I don’t think they’re European, but I pay NameCheap for email service. Local clients access via IMAP.
Spam filtering is mostly done via Thunderbird on my laptop.
Calander and contacts I do though Nextcloud.
I use Radicale for my calendars and contacts as basically every program, app or device can handle caldav/carddav.
Self-hosting email however is too painful. Not that it isn’t easy on principle… but because the basics are simple all the big mail providers have developed a lot of ways to automatically filter out all those quickly put up mail servers mainly used to distribute spam. So having your own mail server while also constantly jumping through all the hoops so your mails are actually received is barely worth it.
Mail is something I don’t want to touch. I use mailbox which is hosted in germany for some years now. For calendar & contacts I use the built-in Nextcloud apps, they also work pretty well
Same here in terms of don’t want to touch mail. I use migadu, swiss company hosting in france. Works flawlessly. There was a good blogpost some time ago comparing mail services, let me check… there it is: Blogpost
Yea, me aswell. Also in the mailbox and am really happy with their service, but don’t they use Open-Xchange? I don’t think its Nextcloud.
I repeatedly see people saying “don’t host your own mailserver”. So what are we supposed to do? Just give up and let megacorps own all of our mail? I get it, it goes to those servers anyways. F-that. I’m not giving up yet another service to them. Personally, I have a VPS with racknerd and use docker mail server. Been using it for a couple years now and no issues so far. Just make sure your DKIM/SPF records are good.
I’ve self-hosted email for over 20 years but I’m now moving to Fastmail for two reasons: (1) succession, I’m the only one in my house that understands how it works, and (2) email is never fully under your control and the large providers may decide to filter/drop email from your domain. But this is self-hosted, and I did enjoy my years doing it, so go for it if you want. I had good luck with OpenBSD/OpenSMTPD/Dovecot stack. Good luck!
Edit: I forgot to mention you can do a hybrid approach; handle receiving yourself and use a service like smtp2go.com to do delivery.
I’ve been using smtp2go for the past 2 ish years for outbound email, and it’s been great! I have no complaints.
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Self-hosting email is like making your own butter.
It’s possible, but most people don’t want to take it on themselves.
Calendar and contacts I’d argue are good candidates to self host. If a config is off and you can’t access them for a day or two, does it matter?
But if email is down, you risk missing something important. If you have a trust issue and everything you send is getting flagged as spam? Hard and slow to fix.
If the problem you’re trying to solve is Flaky and Unethical Big Tech, I would look at finding another, smaller provider and paying for it. Rolling it yourself is a great way to learn entirely too much about mail servers and spending way too much of your free time on it.
Email/calendar/contacts on EU server: posteo.de
They support IMAP and DAV
I host my email, just not at home but on a rented server.
Here I documented it all https://wiki.gardiol.org/4-e-mail-hosting
It works, its been working for decades now. Never had significant issues…
Email is quite resilient. Servers keep trying to send again and again messages for hours before they give up… So a backup server is not even really required.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System IMAP Internet Message Access Protocol for email ISP Internet Service Provider NAS Network-Attached Storage SMTP Simple Mail Transfer Protocol TLS Transport Layer Security, supersedes SSL VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
[Thread #167 for this comm, first seen 12th Nov 2026, 22:40] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
If incoming emails bounce, normal email servers will see that and retry later. Not that I personally deal with email- I outsource it to Disroot.org :)
Went to look since I had never heard of it. Found this, lol.
Yes, unfortunate timing on my part, but my inbox has been unaffected because I don’t store emails long-term and evidently I’m here, on their instance. It sounds way worse than it is.
I have run my own mail server for 20+ years. I set up everything correctly, including DKIM and DMARC. I have had the same IPs for 10 years. I send <100 emails a month. A few years ago Google started putting most of my emails in spam, and Microsoft started silently deleting them. They will not fix it. I had to start paying for a relay for outgoing messages.
Use migadu.com.
