What are the best e-mail providers out there?
What are the best e-mail providers out there?
I've got a couple of e-mail addresses with the main providers, but I'm looking to switch to an ad-free and more secure provider.
I've been looking at ProtonMail, but what do you guys use or recommend?
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I roll my own. Postfix, dovecot, spamassasin and dmarc friends. Easy to setup? No. But takes about an hour/year of my time to maintain once the ball is going.
do you happen to have done guide in place, or some docker compose I can look at?
The best option is https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver
I've tried them all, and this one I super-easy in comparison. Great documentation and just some ENV variables and you're done. Happy to share my compose file with you if you want.
I use it with my Active Directory hosted with https://github.com/Fmstrat/samba-domain for users, but it has many different user options.
mailcow is by far the easiest way to self host email: https://docs.mailcow.email/getstarted/install/#initialize-mailcow
Be aware that it's significantly easier to host on smaller trusted hosting providers. Hosting this on cloud providers like DigitalOcean is almost impossible without getting blacklisted.
Haven't used Mailcow in a while, but personally I found https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver better at the time. Great docs, many features.
I've never heard of mailcow specifically, but I was intentionally avoiding all-in-one packages when setting up. Life has proven that good things aren't easy and easy things aren't good.
And so far I'm happy with that decision - setup is modular, was already able to extend it with postfwd, dual dkim signatures (rsa and ed25519), mta-sts and some other policy I can't recall right now.
I've also specifically wanted to run as little code as possible that's exposed to the internet - as such, I chose to not have webmail.
I also hosted my mail directly with Postfix and Dovecot back in the day before the all-in-one packages were a thing.
mailcow has reduced my yearly maintenance from a few hours to a few minutes. Addtionally it runs in Docker, meaning each service is fully isolated and it can be updated with a single command and without headache. Also includes a really handy web interface to configure each of the services, it even does 2FA if you are worried about security.
Have been running it since before it was using Docker and have 0 complaints, it always works and always improves.
Happy it works for you!
I'm running it on arch so that I never have to go through big upgrades. Been over 5 years now - so far, so good!
In regards to docker - it's just a container. You can make any executable run a container. I quite like a lean system myself, though.
I don't, but I could probably come up with one next weekend.