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.

  • gopher@programming.devEnglish
    1·
    6 hours ago

    I run mailcow on a vps on a smaller, reputable, European host. I started out with Hetzner but there I had problems with delivery due to a bad neighbourhood. It really helps with a host that cares and take abuse seriously.

    After moving it’s mostly been good. I don’t have any issues with outgoing mail, all seems to land fine on both gmail/outlook etc. It’s pretty low effort, just need to stay on top of upgrades since there are internet exposed services.

    Here is also a good post about best practice for smaller servers: https://bridge.grumpy-troll.org/2020/07/small-mailserver-bcp/

    I have a filter that encrypts all incoming mail with my pgp public key, for added security (this is not bullet proof as it has to sit after rspamd but should make it harder to read any mails in case of any kinds of breaches).