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.

  • smiletolerantly@awful.systemsEnglish
    8·
    8 hours ago

    I’m hosting my own, on a dedicated Hetzner server (used for a bunch of stuff, “dedicated” as in “only me on the hardware”), using nixos-mailserver.

    I’ve a 10/10 score on all the spam tests / deliverability tests I could find. The only deliverability issue I’ve ever had is t-online, but only because they require you to apply for being allowlisted, lmao. (Was one quick email to do that though, so… fine.)

    It’s been a couple of years of smooth sailing now, so I’m not super worried anymore; esp. in the beginning though, it was a bit anxiety-inducing (and I did cause some downtime by fucking up my bootloader and needing a KVM from Hetzner at one point, that was a very sweaty evening not least because the email address I had put for contact info was, well, handled by the server that was down. Btw Hetzner email you the link to your KVM. Fun times!).

    Anyways: I’m really happy with my setup now, in all aspects. Calendar and contacts self-hosting is also great.

    But, just so you know: you will not be able to do this on your residential IP. Doesn’t matter how hard you try, it will not work. You’ll be able to receive emails no problem, but if you’re lucky you’ll end up in people’s spam folder. More likely, the recipient server will just outright reject or discard your mail.

      • smiletolerantly@awful.systemsEnglish
        4·
        6 hours ago

        ~46€/month for the server via their server auctions (triple 512GB SSDs in a zpool, 64GB RAM, i7-7700, in their German datacenter with unlimited Gbit internet… not too shabby!) . Unfortunately, looking at them now, they’ve shot up in price (wonder why… 🙄).

        That’s overkill though. As long as you can get something with full root access and a dedicated IP (which includes their VPS offerings, I am pretty sure), you’re good.

        I know everyone is already glazing Hetzner, but let me just add to the pile… I’ve been customer at a lot of (mostly web, sometimes vps)-hosters over the years, but I don’t think I’ll ever switch away from Hetzner again. Even if they raise prices further. They give you full control, don’t try to upsell, and more importantly, have excellent support.

        As others have mentioned, hosters often block outgoing email ports. This includes Hetzner. Sent them an email, 5min later, ports are open. Need a KVM? Press a button, it’ll be ready in a couple of minutes, once a technician has walked over to your machine and plugged it in. Are you as stupid as I am and have no access to the email account receiving the KVM link? Call support, no queue, immediate problem resolution. One of the SSDs looks like it’s gonna give out soon? Press a button in the dashboard, a technician will come around in a couple of minutes and swap the drive, free of charge.

        IDK it just feels like I’m getting enterprise support for consumer prices.

        Also I just now realize you only asked for a price, so everything beyond the first sentence is just me rambling.

          • smiletolerantly@awful.systemsEnglish
            3·
            5 hours ago

            Yes, I am 😄

            Though I originally did get this for email. Wanted a dedicated server with triple SSDs for redundancy, and the i7+64G was the cheapest option!

            Ah, different times.

            But yes, I’m regularly maxing out CPU + RAM for hours on end.