this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2024
69 points (91.6% liked)
Privacy
32424 readers
332 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I just have my own domain (and mail server). If you don’t want to host a mail server (and you shouldn’t), you can get a mail forwarding service to forward all *@domain.tld emails to your email
Why? I always wanted one but never been able to do it
It's a lot of work to keep the spammers out and make sure gmail, etc. will accept your messages and not mark them as spam. A brand-new mail system with no history looks a lot like a new spam operation to them.
True. Glad I didn't continue with it, thanks!
Google is easy. Microsoft is a PAIN
Meg, not that difficult really. There are Docker based services that do it all self-contained.
Why have you never been able to do it? I set up a full mail system years ago on a Xen/Linux VPS with stuff like Postfix, maildrop, Courier IMAP, a custom set of MySQL tables for aliases and such, and at one point migrated my TLS from CACert to LetsEncrypt. I enjoyed some aspects of the huge pain in the ass that all of that was, and having it work nicely was great. Spinning up a new email alias was easy and free, so I created a new one for damn near every site I interacted with, which later turned into a form of lock in having to continue running my server.
The continual server maintenance was a pain in the ass, requiring me to remember in substantial detail how it all worked so that I could appropriately integrate new things I had to learn like SPF and DMARC. I’m glad to have had some detailed sysadmin experience, but I was so glad in the end to finally migrate away from all that and just pay Fastmail instead.
I still have nearly the same flexibility with Fastmail and my custom domains, but they’re the ones that need to do all the maintenance. I can’t scale across unlimited domains for the same zero marginal cost, but I can make it work for a reasonable price with a few domains and scale arbitrarily within that. I’m sure there are other hosts out there that do a similarly good job, and Fastmail hasn’t been without its own troubles, but it’s been a net win for me.
I don’t recommend running your own server. I won’t do it again. I do recommend building an army of custom aliases all at your own custom domain(s).
Oh, no, I have my own domain. I chose not to use the service that wouldn't accept it.