People will suggest running your own mail server, and if you have the time and energy then definitely do that.
But the next best thing you can do is simply just use your own domain. That way, you can at least decide to migrate your email elsewhere. Don't use the free domains you get from things like gmail or other providers, because then you have to _change_ your email address, and not just your MX records.
10 GB space, 1 tld domain of your choice, 99,9% uptime for 1.85€/month with a setup fee of 10€. Hetzner will take care of everything else for you as it's managed webhosting.
Just because you can (theoretically) run your own infrastructure does not mean you should. Trust the professionals. You don't do your own surgeries, do you?
(not affiliated to Hetzner, just was the first offer I thought of.)
I've used Fastmail for several years now with no issues apart from a slowdown in the phone app a few months back (website still loaded fine). It's a bit more expensive at $50/year/user (about $4.17/month), but you get 25GB of combined mail and file storage, contact/calendar/note syncing, simple static web hosting that's good in a pinch, a very nice web front end, and superb customer support. Not affiliated with them just a happy customer.
It's still putting all your eggs in one basket in a sense, but being a paid service there's a sense of privacy, security, and permanence that Gmail and the other free providers don't offer. I do own my own domain as well, and I have mail accounts tied to it that I use for certain services and communications, mostly medical and local businesses, but I'm still at the mercy of my hosting provider for that domain. With that said, my provider (Tiger Technologies) has been astoundingly awesome and has never let me down in 12+ years of service.
I agree with this, and setting it up with Fastmail was so easy, I set up two more domains just for fun. Same goes for adding import from Gmail/Softbank/Apple/anywhere. It's like a 1 minute procedure to import an account, literally. Excellent product, glad I migrated off of Gmail.
> People will suggest running your own mail server, and if you have the time and energy then definitely do that.
As a learning experience, sure, but most people are not prepared for what running a 24/7 mail service requires of them.
First of all, a static, non-residential IP is likely needed. The big players will flat out refuse receiption if your IP is registered as residential, so that rules out hosting it from your home despite having gigabit internet.
You also need SPF, DMARC and DKIM working, or major players will also flat out refuse reception.
On top of that, you need to implement the infrastructure to actually host a server 24/7, including patching and backups, as well as monitoring it for unauthorized access.
Despite all of the above, you may still find yourself on a spam/block list, and removing yourself from these can also turn into a large task.
Part of the irony of Gmail having outages is that Google and other "large players" have fought long and hard for a decade to make it harder to host your own mail server. It has been done in the name of fighting spam, but i doubt any of them minded it making it harder to run your own.
So yeah, build your own mail server as a learning experience. Then move the domain to someone dedicated to running it.
I purchased a lifetime subscription (limited promo offer) with mxroute.com. 10GB mail storage, unlimited domains and accounts (limited by space only), as well as a Nextcloud instance for all your users.
Service and uptime has been nothing but exceptional. Customer support is actually reachable. The only downside is that the spam filter (SpamAssassin IIRC) is not as highly trained as the GMail one, so more spam comes through.
I think the barriers are overstated a bit. I have email on my own server, part of the stuff I run on a dedicated server. Granted, it costs money, but I'm using the server for more than email anyway. That takes care of the IP address, and since the server's with a data hosting company, they take care of the network infrastructure, hardware maintenance and such.
Downtime hasn't been a major issue - senders will retry sending email, usually multiple times over several days. I've been able to have downtime of 24-48 hours without losing any messages.
A SPF record is just another easy to create DNS entry. If you know how to manage DNS, setting up SPF is a matter of minutes. DKIM is just slightly more complicated, with an extra key generation step. Sites like mxtoolbox.com can help you validate records.
The biggest problem I think I have with my own server is security. I do patch the machine regularly, but of course I don't have the same kind of security that Google or another big player would. On the other hand, I suspect I might have a smaller attack surface and better security than plenty of small websites.
> First of all, a static, non-residential IP is likely needed.
If you want to directly send mail that's true. But if you send mail through a smarthost, like your isp's smtp server, you can easily receive mail on a dynamic, residential ip.
> implement the infrastructure to actually host a server 24/7,
email is really tolerant of downtime. You can be down for hours without losing mail. The sending servers will retry for a while.
> I purchased a lifetime subscription (limited promo offer) with mxroute.com.
At the risk of stating the obvious, note that 'lifetime' refers to the lifetime of the company, not the customer. Which underscores the risk of buying lifetime subscriptions.
And as much as I like the idea of avoiding recurring costs (I have a 'lifetime' Plex pass), it seems to me that these can't be sustainable for the company on the long term.
I’m aware it’s the company’s lifetime (unless my expiration date comes up first), and I act accordingly with nightly backups of all mail.
It’s really no different than Google, where a single bad comment somewhere in their vast eco system can end up getting your account banned.
In my case I try to stay as far away from Google as I can with my everyday services. I’m also well aware that chances are extremely high that any email I send will make its way to Googles servers.
The “easy” solution would be to self host, and I do that to some extent, but as I work with system administration I really don’t want/need another day job. I’m actively looking for relatively secure, privacy aware and affordable cloud solutions for everyday use. I wrote affordable because nothing is free.
The main problem with self-hosting is indiscriminate blacklisting by Google and Microsoft. You only need to be on the same network as some spam artist to end up shunned. The tech giants are our new overlords.
No, it is not. It really grinds my gears if people are spreading misinformation about 'being on the same network as a spammer', 'indiscriminate blacklists' and corporate overlords for being the reason on why their email is not being delivered.
Spam filters have been content driven for a long time now. IP addresses and domain names are ephemeral and so are 'blacklists'. With the amount of spam being send, we would have blacklisted the entire internet by now.
If a spam filter gives false positives, it hurts the receiver just as much as the sender.
The real problem with self-hosting is that the majority of self-hosted e-mail servers are terribly configured. Getting the SMTP server running is one thing, but getting DKIM, DMARC, SPF, TLS and MTA-STS running properly is often overlooked. What was the last time you checked the validity of the TLS certificate of your SMTP server?
Get your server and domain setup properly. Sign your email with DKIM, setup an SPF and DMARC policy and perform DMARC monitoring to spot problems. Setup TLS and an MTA-STS policy service for your incoming email. Throw in SMTP-TLS-reporting for good measure. E-mail servers are not set-and-forget if you want to do it right. And this is not the fault of large corps, it's the spammers who got us in this situation.
It's really easy to blame large services or blaming your email deliverability problems on being on the same IP block as a spammer, but really it's almost always a misconfiguration on your side.
Disclaimer: I'm the founder of Mailhardener (https://www.mailhardener.com), we do e-mail hardening and solve deliverability issues.
My corporate overlord (~10k ppl) has a policy to place all incoming email from domains less than 30 days old into the Junk folder, it's a tier 1 rule which cannot be overridden or circumvented by user rules. No amount of properly configured mail services will matter in this scenario. :-/
That's probably more of a phishing defense, but not really effective either way. 'Good' spammers will be constantly registering domains and only use the ones that are a few months old since time-based spam policies are fairly common. This type of policy only works for low-barrel spam and shady operations that register domains with stolen credit cards and end up losing their domain within a few weeks once the chargebacks get to the registrar.
Yah, I do not defend it in any way - it's security theatre to me; they also wholescale block entire TLDs (more than one) under the same umbrella, block access (HTTP) to any domain less than 30 days old as well. It is in my experience that most companies of size implement compliance checkbox solutions and do not really care about internal user experience, you (me, we) are expendable and replaceable. Comply or face sanction/termination of employment, compliance is what matters to the business.
You can self-host the receiving side of your mail server (with spam filtering etc.), but send all your mail through a mail provider with a good reputation. Configure your own SMTP server to use that other server as a relay, you can even do your own DKIM signing before sending off your mail. At least then you shouldn't have a problem with IP reputation.
I have been doing this. I bought a domain and am using zoho.com to send and receive emails for free. Storage is only 5GB but I can always pay if I want more.
Good luck getting the same quality of service as gmail with your own mail server. The fact that gmail fails every so often (extremely rarely actually) is a good sign: zero failure would mean that they are over-investing in quality and losing flexibility. Gmail only needs to be as good as the best web service out there.
But you can pay for email from other providers like Fastmail and Proton and just have your own domain with MX pointing at them. Services are better in my opinion when you pay for them and you’re not the product.
Does gmail have such a big lock-in effect on users since it allows them to use the gmail interface with their own email? (i.e. you can split the service and the UI)
Yes, gmail is complete lock in (with current legislation). You can not move your `@gmail.com` address to another provider eg. Proton.
But there is a case for making legislation forcing email providers to allow moving emails to other providers (how it should be done technically is another question). This is already in effect for telephone numbers many places.
I was lucky enough to get in at the ground for the Apps for Business (or whatever name it has now) service when it was free, and I was able to use my own domain for that.
As such, migrating these email addresses was easy enough.
My older @gmail and @googlemail ones though, not so easy. I've been moving each account I have used with these addresses one-by-one, but you never catch them all and even when you do, some services simply will not let you change your email address.
I recall being so excited when Gmail first launched and was one of the first people to get a Beta invite. I regret ever signing up for them now, given the headache it has been to get off it.
Parent suggests to just run mail on your own domain.
The main thing here is to avoid single point of failure as in both domains (politically induced problems) and infrastructure (technically induced problems). If people would use more than just a handful domains/providers for mail then single failures would not have that big of an impact.
I have been hosting my mail on my own domain for the past 3 years and have not been impacted by this incident. Currently I am happy for protonmail that I use to host my mails at. But I know that I can easily move on, if service drops, and even selfhost.
an individual mail getting onto an blacklist is most often than not a dead sentence for the address, the domain and sometimes even the ip.
but if google is at fault and email get into a permanently removed bucket, like in this event, it's in the interest of the other to play nice and accommodate for the fault.
I think people severely underestimate how hard it actually is to consistently deliver email in 2020 between dkim, spf and domain keys while tiptoeing around everyone else ip/email antispam services.
But the next best thing you can do is simply just use your own domain. That way, you can at least decide to migrate your email elsewhere. Don't use the free domains you get from things like gmail or other providers, because then you have to _change_ your email address, and not just your MX records.