self-hosted mail server?

7 March, 2025 - Categories: selfhosting, email

Now that it's 2025, i am making another attempt at running my own e-mail server for private email.

I've attempted it a few times, but was never happy with either the result or the maintenance required. My most recent attempt (before this one) was as such:

• use forwardemail to actually receive and deliver the mails - this avoids getting your mail marked as spam, and ensures good uptime
• store the mail on forwardemail's "encrypted storage" offer - safe, always up imap mailbox with 10gb storage for cheap.
• access it with a selfhosted rainloop frontend - lets us keep control of looks, features and so on. No upsells, no annoying notifications, keep it simple. the problem: the rainloop frontend was, for some reason, EXTREMELY slow. opening a tiny mail that's been there forever and opened before took over 2 seconds. each click had massive delay. this might have been forwardemail's fault, or rainloops, but either way it was annoying.

since that was bad, i set up a different domain and pointed it to protonmail - for which you need premium, cost me like $50 a year which is pricy for just email but i thought its a decent service. turns out its really not - as time went on, there were more and more "SPECIAL OFFER!! PROTONMAIL MAXIMUM PLAN FOR JUST $200 A YEAR IF YOU BUY 10 YEARS NOW!!!!", to the point i had to click away some bullshit or other each time i checked my mail. not acceptable for a service i'm paying good money for already.

So the newest solution that caught my eye: mox. a single go executable that combines email sending+receiving, imap storage, webmail, spamfilter and a nice setup guide that helps you set up all the proper DNS records.

I've set it up and it works great so far, apart from my first test mails having landed in spam. i assume this is due to having sent the test mail the day i bought the domain, and no mailserver likes receiving mail from an hours-old domain. we'll see how it goes.

Fun fact - after getting annoyed by cloudns' upsell attempts (no i do not want to run my entire monitoring with my dns provider, thank you) i decided to go with some local domain registrars. having tried 2 so far, buying a domain on each because they don't tell you what you can do unless you have one, neither supported the DNS records needed for a proper email setup including DNSSEC. might run my own....

sorry for the long rambling.