I give up.
I tried left and right to try to install an email server so I could degoogle my life.
But therechnical barrier is thick and Google keeps adding more to it. Forget it. I can’t even get thru the installation process much less trying to get my shit off Google.
I figure, I don’t actually have any need for my email addresses. Just like my phone number. I never call anyone. I’m going to discourage my kids from using email at all. I’ll remind everyone I know that I don’t use email at every opportunity I get just like I remind people to not call me and that my phone number is not available.
Between spammers and Google, I just don’t need this headache in my life. My mom is much less technically savvy than the average pet. So Google will just siphon her data and when the megabits are full then you just delete the old stuff.
You don’t need it. No one will spend their life reading your emails when you’re gone or watching your videos or listening to your recordings or viewing your photos. There’s no need to worry about just deleting the pile of shit you’ve accumulated. I’m this done.
Posteo is a good provider for 1usd per month.
I moved to https://mxroute.com/ and payed $15 for three years of hosting because they had some promotion.
But about the videos and photos I think you’re a bit wrong, I still rewatch my dads home videos from the 90’s
i have a neighbor that keeps her old answering machine because her late-husband’s voice is on it. she has no home videos or anything else… just a few snapshots and that answering machine.
Personally I don’t self-host email :
- For personal emails, I use posteo.de
- For accounts, I use alias vault
You don’t have to use Gmail. There are many, many other options.
Thanks for introducing me to posteo, was looking for something to leave proton for
People repeat and repeat that email is hard but it’s a legend. I have been self hosting for years on a residential ip and a random domain and it just works
I self hosted for many years but gave up due to family members complaining about the occasional rejection. You are made of stronger stuff than I am, kudos.
You were ambitious providing it for your family
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 SMTP Simple Mail Transfer Protocol TLS Transport Layer Security, supersedes SSL VPN Virtual Private Network VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
[Thread #4 for this comm, first seen 8th Jun 2026, 05:50] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
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Just use mailbox.org or posteo.de . Using one of those providers is so much better than a Google mail address but so easier than hosting your own mail server.
Yep honestly paying for posteo (fully foss back-end) is worth it. Self-hosting email is on the hardest side, not impossible but require more time and knowledge than many other services.
I’d try Maddy if I were going to setup my personal email server now. But I already have postfix/dovecot/all-that-shit up and running.
weird to see someonengetting worked up about a service he barely uses and sending little data by default.
Hell is other people. My wife opens her new phone and says! Hey why am I running out of space already! See my gmail says I got no more space!
I tried syncthing and it was great for a while. Now I got an rsync script that I gotta run from time to time.
But wouldn’t it be great if The email just came off the bastards and into my own central server instead? That’s what I’ve been trying hard to do. I’m just not hitting the ball on this one. Mailcow, mailserver, stalwart, and a good other bunch. I always just get stuck in some part of the installation or end up with issues sending or receiving. But thinking about it, if I have issues, she’s going to have issues. So it’s not even worth it.
Running your own email server is easy.
Getting your email accepted by other servers is hard.
Hosting anything publicly requires a significant amount of hardening.
Neither of those two tasks are easy or low maintenance. I self host almost everything and I’ve run my own mail server (with occasional rejection). It’s not worth it for me; I now use a commercial, paid provider.
Self host all the services you want, but don’t ever touch sendmail and bind. The most constantly attacked services I’ve ever had my ass on the line for. I won’t even manage them for money anymore.
Sounds like a deal to me.
https://hub.docker.com/r/mailserver/docker-mailserver/
It just works. Once you got it working.
I used to run my own mailserver, but I haven’t in years now since it was so much of a pain. Not even the set-up part; that wasn’t the worst thing in the world. It’s uptime, back-ups, and other considerations that just require time and money I don’t have.
I mean I did an email transfer as a multihat guy at a small business and mx records are a bitch. granted more so because there needs to be no loss or delay. might be easier for an individual. but I don’t roll my own.
I rage guit my email server long ago. True, as evidenced in this thread, there are some who successfully run their own email server and that’s awesome. I am quite jealous. I too gave up, but I went with a small EU based company. It’s no frills, just the basics. I don’t send/receive a lot of email, so I don’t need all the bells and whistles. If you’re de-googling your life, you don’t have to specifically run your own email service. I do hear a lot of positives about MailCow tho.
