I have a unique name, think John Doe, and I’m hoping to create a unique and “professional” looking email account like [email protected] or [email protected]. Since my name is common, all reasonable permutations are taken. I was considering purchasing a domain with something unique, then making personal family email accounts for [email protected] [email protected] etc.
Consider that I’m starting from scratch (I am). Is there a preferred domain registrar, are GoDaddy or NameCheap good enough? Are there prebuilt services I can just point my domain to or do I need to spin up a VPS and install my own services? Are there concerns tying my accounts to a service that might go under or are some “too big to fail”?
I can expand what hangs off the domain later, but for now I just need a way to make my own email addresses and use them with the relative ease of Gmail or others. Thanks in advance!!
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Do NOT self-host email! In the long run, you’ll forget a security patch, someone breaches your server, blasts out spam and you’ll end up on every blacklist imaginable with your domain and server.
Buy a domain, DON’T use GoDaddy, they are bastards. I’d suggest OVH for European domains or Cloudflare for international ones.
After you have your domain, register with “Microsoft 365” or “Google Workspace” (I’d avoid Google, they don’t have a stable offering) or any other E-Mail-Provider that allows custom domains.
Follow their instructions on how to connect your domain to their service (a few MX and TXT records usually suffice) and you’re done.
After that, you can spin up a VPS and try out new stuff and connect it also to your domain (A and CNAMR records).
That said, you can use a third party service only for sending, but receive mail on your self-hosted server.
That’s what I’m doing. I have selfhosted E-Mail with YunoHost and send it through SMTP2Go.
I’ve been successfully using SES for a couple years now without issue.
They rejected me for using for personal notifications. I get being strict but good God let me use your service and if I abuse it shut me down.
What do you mean, “for personal notifications”? I have a bunch of alert notifications that route through SES back to me. Never had an issue.
SES requires a manual review by their support to be able to send external emails. I was requesting for access to send to my Gmail notifications (and friends technically) from my self hosted services. They rejected my request.
Weird. I don’t remember my exact request but it was basically “send email on my personal domains” and they approved it.
Must have had a nice representative! Haha
Do you have more details on your setup?
I currently selfhost mailcow on a small VPS but I would like to move the receiving part to my homelab and only use a small VPS or service like SES for sending.
I set this up a couple years ago but I seem to remember AWS walking me through the initial setup.
First you’ll need to configure your domain(s) in SES. It requires you to set some DNS records to verify ownership. You’ll also need to configure your SPF record(s) to allow email to be sent through SES. They provide you with all of this information.
Next, you’ll need to configure SES credentials or it won’t accept mail from your servers. From a security standpoint, if you have multiple SMTP servers I would give each a unique set of credentials but you can get away with one for simplicity.
Finally you’ll need to configure your MTA to relay through SES. If you use postfix here’s a quick guide: https://medium.com/@cloudinit/sending-emails-with-postfix-and-amazon-ses-2341489a97e2
I’ve got postfix configured on each of my VPS servers, plus and internal relay, to relay all mail through SES. To the best of my knowledge it’s worked fine. I haven’t had issues with mail getting dropped or flagged as SPAM.
There is a cost, but with my email volumes (which are admittedly low) it costs me 2-3 cents a month.
All good advice. I’d recommended protonmail for mail hosting - got very good experience with them and the onky downside is you have to use their client.
I was using proton for a while, but they are pretty expensive if you want features like catchall and more aliases, on top of restricting clients.
Migadu offers complete email freedom for $20 ($10 for students) a year, unlimited accounts, aliases, identities, etc. I’ve been very happy with them.
I’ll second not self hosting email unless you’re in it for the experience.
I’d also strongly caution against hosting email for friends and family unless you want to own that relationship for the rest of your life.
If you do it anyway, you’re going to end up locked into whatever solution you decide for a long time, because now you have users who rely on that solution.
If you still go forward, don’t use Google (or msft). Use a dedicated email service. Having your personal domain tied to those services just further complicates the lock in.
(I did this over a decade ago, with Google, when it was just free vanity domain hosting. I’ve been trying for years to get my users migrated to Gmail accounts.)
If I had it all to do over again. I’d probably setup accounts as vanity forwards to a “real” account for people who wanted them. That’s easy to maintain, move around, and you’re not dealing with migrating peoples oauth to everything when you want to move or stop paying for it.
I have a bunch of users (friends and family) on a bunch of different domains. It’s honestly not so bad but yeah, you need a decent dedicated service.
Migrations aren’t simple but aren’t that complicated either (just did one last year).
I mainly need to copy their email over but it’s also a good moment to check they’re using decent passwords and to have them freshen it.
I also need to update their webmail and IMAP/SMTP URLs in their bookmark/email apps but I’ve been playing with DNS CNAMEs for this purpose and it’s mostly working ok (aliasing one of my domains to the provider’s so I only have to update the DNS which I do anyway for a mail migration).
My mistake was using Google but when it was just the ability to have a personal domain as your google account. But they kept expanding and morphing that into what is now Google Workspace. Migrating people off of that requires them to abandon their Google accounts and start over. If it was just email it would be a much simpler prospect to change backends.
Can you not transfer away a domain from Google as you would from any other registrar? And then set the MX records to point at another mail service?
Certainly. But, what I’m trying to say is it’s not just email. My users are using my domain as their Google account. All Google services, oAuth, etc…, not just email. To do it right I need to get them to migrate their google services to a gmail.com account.
I’d avoid Google, they don’t have a stable offering
What you you mean by not stable?
I’ve been (stuck with) Google Workspace for many, many years - I was grandfathered out from the old G-Suite plans. The biggest issue for me is that all my Play store purchases for my Android are tied to my Workspace’s identity, and there’s no way to unhook that if I move.
I want to move. I have serious trust issues with Google. But I can’t stop paying for Workspaces, as it means I’d lose all my Android purchases. It’s Hotel fucking California.
But I’ve always found the email to be stable, reliable, and the spam filtering is top notch (after they acquired and rolled Postini into the service).
I tore that bandwidth off a while ago. Same thing with trust issues and google.
Since then I set up a family account and use a regular Gmail account for app store purchases so I can change provider at any time. Can share most of my app purchases with family. I don’t actually check the gmail email. Just use it for Android services.
Yeah, that’s the other thing that shits me. Paying for my wife and I on Workspaces, and we don’t have family sharing rights. We’re literally paying to be treated like second-class citizens!
I mean, they kill services willy nilly. Sure Gmail will probably survive, but the rest drove me away (Reader, Music, …).
Regarding your Android purchases: At the time of my move I went through my list of apps I bought and tallied the ones up, that I still used. It was less than $50 of repurchases.
Don’t let those old purchases hold you back. Cut this old baggage loose.
At the time of my move I went through my list of apps I bought and tallied the ones up, that I still used. It was less than $50 of repurchases.
Yeah, I know this what I should do too. As someone else said in this comment thread, gotta tear that bandaid off at some point. Just shits me that I should have to. But the freedom after doing it… <chef’s kiss>
One warning, though: After moving, you’ll probably need another Google account again, to use the Play Store… it sucks.
Yeah, still got my ancient free Gmail account going. Will probably revert to that.
“But I shouldn’t have to” is a trap, everywhere it occurs. It cripples one’s ability to act on an emotional level, and manifests as all kinds of resistances and avoidances that ultimately prevent you from seeing the problem clearly - and if you somehow do see the problem clearly, you still don’t want to do anything about it.
The world owes you nothing. You exist. If you want love and fairness and a reasonable world, love and be fair and be reasonable, and choose to work together with those who are. Where you work, what you spend your time on, where you spend your money, and who you spend your time with are your places of impact. Don’t let others steal that - particularly over ‘but I shouldn’t have to defend myself.’
FWIW ive used Google for about ten years for email and have never modified my DNS records. They seem extremely stable.
It’s basically a Gmail account with a custom domain.
I did as well, but then I went Microsoft and never looked back. Google’s platform still feels like a shitty startup with missing stuff everywhere, compared to Azure (or AWS).
The only thing I’m missing is Google Photos, but there are self-hosted alternatives out, that I’ll try soon.
I’d throw in mailbox.org as a more privacy-focused alternative to Google and Microsoft. Been using them for years without issues. Only their 2FA solution sucks.
If you get your domain from OVH, you get one single mailbox (be it with a lot of aliases, like a different email-address for every service/website you use) for free.
Yes you need a domain for sure. But you don’t need a server for it, in fact I don’t recommend trying to self-host mail server.
You can use Tuta, Proton Mail, Gmail or iCloud Mail services. You just need to add some DNS records to the domain to redirect mail provider.
Cloudflare + protonmail is my setup. Works great and if you buy like 2 years it’s pretty cheap.
Yeah I’m also using Proton but I will switch to Tuta because it has more features I think.
I just wanted mail and privacy directed.
Use Cloudflare or PorkBun.com for cheap, no bullshit domains. As for the email host, self hosting not recommended. It’s a long battle to be not blocked by every other provider.
I recommend purelymail.com - no cost to add (even multiple!) custom domains, unlimited users, only pay for mail usage and storage. Go for advanced pricing until it starts costing you more than $10/yr. (Which it shouldn’t if it’s just you. Seriously this thing is cheap!) I just passed my one year anniversary with PurelyMail, and have spent $6 so far. This is my most expensive month, 85¢. And that’s only because I host a public Lemmy instance (small) and we had a few hundred spam signups which sends an email each time.
This will give you a total yearly price WAY under what Google or Microsoft will give you. Google is like, $7.20/user/month.
And if for some reason that service goes down one day, as long as you still have a mail client with your email stored in it you should be able to just switch providers and import your emails from your client. Make some backups.
For anybody interested in more choices for volume-based providers like PurelyMail (with tiers based on storage and emails sent/received but who otherwise allow unlimited domains/mailboxes/aliases) there’s also MXRoute (US) and Migadu (Swiss/EU).
These providers don’t usually make sense for a single mailbox (although some of them have a low entry tier for this purpose) but can be extremely cost-efficient if you need 2 or more mailboxes/domains.
I was very tempted to go for this one, but couldn’t find info on whether this was a one-man operation or if there are any disaster recovery plans. Sounds cruel, but if that one single guy my email depends on gets hit by a bus…
It is. But as said, for personal email what’s the huge risk? You find a new provider, transfer your DNS records, and upload your old emails.
Make some backups of your emails, you should be anyway.
But they have a specific FAQ for this: https://purelymail.com/docs/companyPolicy#bus
Makes sense. I’m happy with my current provider but purelymail is a strong candidate for if I’m out of options.
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I tried both hosting my own mail server and using a paid mail hosting with my own domain and I advise against the former.
The reason not to roll out your own mail server is that your email might go to spam at many many common mail services. Servers and domains that don’t usually send out big amount of email are considered suspicious by spam filters and the process of letting other mail servers know that they are there by sending out emails is called warming them up. It’s hard and it takes time… Also, why would you think you can do hosting better than a professional that is paid for that? Let someone else handle that.
With your own domain you are also not bound to one provider - you can change both domain registrar and your email hosting later without changing your email address.
Also, avoid using something too unusual. I went with [email protected] cause I thought it couldn’t be simpler than that. Bad idea… and I can’t count how many times people send mail to a wrong address because such tld is unfamiliar. I get told by web forms regularly that my email is not a valid address and even people that got my email written on a piece of paper have replaced the .email with .gmail.com cause “that couldn’t be right”…
I get told by web forms regularly that my email is not a valid address and even people that got my email written on a piece of paper have replaced the .email with .gmail.com cause “that couldn’t be right”…
That’s the thing that holds me back from a non-standard TLD, as much as I’d love to get a vanity domain.
I’ve got a .org I’ve had for over 20 years now. My primary email address has been on that domain for almost as long. While I don’t have problems with web-based forms, telling people my email address is a chore at best since it’s not gmail, outlook, yahoo, etc…
More and more services are REQUIRING a gmail/outlook/etc. account simply because bots/scammers bombard their services. It’s their cheap captcha.
I’m seeing it more and more and it infuriates me to no end.
As if a scammer can’t get a Gmail address. 😄 What does that even prove?
I think the point is that a scammer may have one or two. But not millions of Gmail addresses.
I keep seeing people say this but I’ve yet to encounter it even once. I fully believe it happens with non-com/net/org TLDs but I’ve been using my .org as my daily driver for 2 decades and have never had it rejected or denied.
The last one I encountered was one of the AI tools. I can’t remember which one. They are popping up like fucking Starbucks now.
They required using your Gmail, Outlook, or Discord credentials.
You mean those websites that instead of email input fields there are multiple horizontal stripes saying “Login with Google” and such?
I hate them, too… but I suppose it’s for the mobile crowd that don’t make distinctions between sms, fb/whatsapp messages, and email altogether.
I wonder if all those gmail accounts will be seen like yahoo addresses one day.
Yeah, I use [email protected]
And EVERY DAMN PERSON corrects .co to .com
Unfortunately the .com.and .net are both used.
You can avoid the warmup by using an SMTP relay, and you can just use the one from your DNS provider if you’re not planning to send hundreds of mails per day.
I’ve done this in the past using Gmail. You pick a domain provider and get their email plan. Most offer both services. I’ve used name cheap.
Then in your regular Gmail account you can configure the IMAP settings from the domain registrar to receive the email from that inbox. Then in Gmail find the settings where you can send as another address. This lets you use that new address in our outbound mail. From there I just auto label the incoming mail to help sort the two addresses.
Now you should have your regular Gmail and your new novelty email all in one place.
Wait, does this mean you’re giving Gmail the password for the other mailbox?
That’s how IMAP works for any mail client
Well yes but normally the email client lives on my phone or PC so nobody else knows my email logins.
GoDaddy is notorious for terrible service and NameCheap has started doing some shady stuff too lately. Luckily there are other decent registrars out there. I can recommend Netim.com or INWX.de in the EU – they also provide EU-specific TLDs which American registrars don’t.
If you need more than one mailbox you can’t beat the offers from providers like PurelyMail/MXRoute/Migadu, where you pay for the storage instead of per-mailbox. I’m using Migadu because, again, they work under EU/Swiss privacy laws.
Here are some more providers if you’re interested in taking advantage of EU privacy: https://european-alternatives.eu/category/email-providers
You do not need to spin up your own mail service and should not. Email and DNS hosting are the most abuse-prone and easy to mess up services; always go to an established provider for these.
Are there concerns tying my accounts to a service that might go under or are some “too big to fail”?
Look into their history. Generally speaking a provider that’s been around for a decade or more probably won’t dissapear overnight; they probably have a sustainable income model and have been around the block.
That being said nothing saves even long-established providers from being acquired. This happened for example to a French service (Gandi) with over 20 years of history.
The only answer to that is to pick providers that don’t lock you into proprietary technologies and offer standard services like IMAP, and also to keep your domain+DNS and your email providers separate. This way if the email service starts hiking prices or does anything funny you can copy your email, switch your domain(s), and be with another provider the very next day.
What did namecheap do? I’ve got a bunch of domains with them. 🤦♂️
A general reduction in service quality, increasing domain prices (double check your renewals) and there are reports of domain name sniping (where they grab names that people are looking up).
Still much less bullshit than other providers. It has less dark patterns than OVH. I would also recommend their VPN service for beeing so cheap the first year
.com domains recently got more expensive. Almost double in price compared to CloudFlare (who sell domains at cost).
Gandi’s case hurts me. I had been paying for years but they kept raising their prices like dragonball z power levels.
I’m an admin of a self hosted iRedMail (with iRedAdmin Pro).
My advice is: Don’t.
Getting an email server running is easy. Managing them is not.
There are some good advice here. Use commercial service with personal domain.
Just throwing in my two cents since I just went through this same ordeal: I use Proton, but be aware that you can only use a custom address if you pay for the premium plan which is not crazy cheap. I’ve been pretty happy with their premium plan so far, which includes premium features for mail, calendar, cloud drive, VPN, and password manager, but if I ever decide that I don’t want to keep paying for it, I can always transfer my custom domain to a different provider without needing to update my email.
As for the domain, I went with namecheap. I also have a pretty common name, so the good domains were taken and I had to settle for [email protected] but I think it’s still pretty easy to remember.
Proton is all fun and games until you find out they don’t support IMAP/SMTP without a bridge.
And that the bridge is only available on PC – on mobile you must use their proprietary app. And they’re working on launching a proprietary desktop app, after which they’ll have no reason to offer the IMAP bridge anymore.
Interesting. I have always used their web app (even on mobile, i just use their pwa instead of the native app since the native app is missing obvious features), and I haven’t had any issues, but I can definitely understand the frustration if you want to use anything else. OP, keep that in mind if you’re thinking about Proton!
Interesting. I have always used their web app (even on mobile, i just use their pwa instead of the native app since the native app is missing obvious features), and I haven’t had any issues, but I can definitely understand the frustration
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve nothing against you… but…
This is the irony with the privacy minded people and anti-google / monopoly folks around here - they can’t use Google and Microsoft because of the monopoly and then use a solution that is 10x more closed and doesn’t even has an option to use standard protocols and email clients. Logic ham ? :P
Yeah the Proton hype has got a bit out of hand lately. Proton started out with good intentions but I don’t think people realize it’s a Swiss startup with a marked interest in making it big, and being acquired by an investment fund is one of the classic exit strategies for startup owners.
All it takes is discontinuing the IMAP bridge and suddenly a large portion of their user base is completely captive. I hope I’m wrong but there may be a big sentiment reversal later this year.
I’ve had providers acquired from under me several times over the last couple decades. They usually get worse after that; new owners typically want to squeeze the customers not to improve quality. That’s why I won’t use (anymore) any email service that’s not easy to migrate away from.
To achieve a reasonable level of email independence you need IMAP access, you need to use your own domain, and you need to keep your DNS service separate from the email provider.
Lots of people have said worthwhile things. Don’t selfhost email for example. While going with an email hoster has been recommended a couple times, which is good and easy, I want to offer an alternative: SimpleLogin (or comparable providers). Essentially a “email alias generator”, it forwards received emails to one or more mail addresses (Google, Hotmail, what have you). It also allows you to connect a domain and then create new inboxes on the fly by simply sending (or telling a service to send) an email to that non-existing inbox. Which is incredibly handy if you’re faced with a situation that demands an email, where you don’t want to give out an actual email.
So say you have the domain doe.com, and you’re in a physical shop at the register, faced with the question if you want to get 10% off by registering for their members club. You can simply give the cashier the email “[email protected]” (which does not yet exist), the email will be sent, received bei SL, the inbox created and the coupon code forwarded to your Gmail account. Afterwards, you can disable or delete the inbox and never have to worry about newsletters or data breaches. Nifty!
Every one of these boxes also has its own “sent from” address visible in your actual mail account. Which means that you can simply respond to incoming emails, and the recipient will see the mail address they sent a message to. This also means that you can set up filters in your mail account to move messages from certain sender addresses into specific labels, as if they were real separate email accounts.
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I find there is less management overhead regarding inboxes with SL, compared to creating, managing and logging into multiple receiving addresses under a real mail server.
Sure, you can set one mail account on your domain and define it as catch all, but then won’t be able to send from these names.
Or you can create accounts you want, but then cannot quickly create new inboxes without opening your control dashboard.
Obviously, if you want to register with a service anonymously, you’d use one of the SL domains, which I do plenty too!
And at the end of the chain, all messages run into the same singular Google inbox, making it easier for me to manage all messages from all domains.
I’m sure paid email hosters will have their own advantages, but as I said at the beginning of my original comment, I want to show an alternative solution, not a better solution.
There are mail providers that let you use anything as a “from” address as long as it’s
@yourdomain. I mean why shouldn’t they, it’s your domain; it’s a silly restriction in the first place. On Migadu it’s called “wildcard sender” and once you activate it for a mailbox its user can send asanything@that.domain(even if it doesn’t exist; they warn you to set up an alias or catch-all for it but let you shoot yourself in the foot).Migadu also lets you define wildcard aliases (like
shopping.at.*@your.domain) which are a good balance of both worlds: it’s not a full catch-all but also you can make them up on the fly without having to go into your settings every time.
Very interesting. How long have you used this? Has it been reliable the whole time?
Please keep in mind that the alias functionality offered by services like SimpleLogin should be included with any paid email service. So SimpleLogin only makes sense if you’re using a free email service (like Gmail) and using the free SL aliases based on their domains; bearing in mind those free tiers will usually be severely limited.
If you intend to get your own domain you might as well use a real mail provider.
Yep, I use Fastmail and it has this well integrated within the service as “Masked Emails”
I’ve been using it for around 1.5 years, and so far I’ve received every message I’ve wanted to receive. Though I am always sort of aware that they are yet another party I depend on with my mail delivery, so I don’t usually use them for crucial services.
SimpleLogin
So people must also acknowledge and agree that the solution can read their messages. I guess your use case is junk mail. If OP is looking for an external email for regular use, this might not be a good solution?
Email encryption, as far as I know, is to this day rarely implemented. So your host as well as any entity in between participants will be able to read your messages. SimpleLogin is also provided by Proton if that means anything to you.
Nice. Yeah, keeping in mind Google/Microsoft have their algorithm/ad stuff going through your messages, we usually just count on them not committing fraud directly against us :)
Purchase the domain with cloudflare, for email it depends how you use it:
With an email client like thunderbird:
A cheap service like mxroute is perfect
If you need to use a webmail:
You need to pay a lot because the free webmails are all unusable for advanced use.
Good options:
- Zoho at $1 per user per month
- Exchange with ovh at €3 per user per month
Bad options:
- Google workspace at $10 per month per user plus the blood rights for your firstborn and pray that they don’t alter the deal
- proton pro at $9 per user per month but IMHO is extremely overrated for what they offer at their price point (unless you need end to end encryption when emailing other proton users)
+1 for own domain and some email hosting service. That also makes it pretty easy to switch providers because you can simply point your MX records etc. somewhere else - no need to change the actual email address.
I can also recommend mailbox.org as an alternative to mxroute, they’re even a little cheaper at $3/month (mxroute is $49/year at minimum).
You may want to check lowendtalk. Jar (mxroute owner) run promo over there, at least once a year.
His last black friday link below. https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/190301/mxroute-black-friday-2023-email-hosting-that-spammers-crave-but-cant-have/p1
His black friday page still up too. https://mxroute.blackfriday/
Cheapest is $15/3 years for 10GB.
I’ve been using his service for years with no issue, and my account is grandfathered plan ($10/year for 50GB)
Non affiliate beside being their customers for years.
Thanks, didn’t know about those deals!
Protonmail is a honeypot. Stay away
As someone who is once again trying to setup an email server, it’s more work than it’s worth for like 99% of people
Give me a ping if you need a hand, I’ve done it for decades.
There is a security risk of using your first name and last name in your email. It’s very easy for malicious people to send you emails specifically addressing you. I have realized it now and I take the extra steps to set up good spam blocking in my email.
I do this. Personally I use cloudflaire for my domain and dns, not that I’m committed to them it’s just what I use. I then use protonmail for my email and point the relivent records to them.
I don’t know current pricing, but a premium proton account, which was ~$9/month when I started has worked very well for me. I like the other features they are rolling out and use them a lot.
Domain is purchased through cloudflare, and I think it was like $10/year?
