this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2026
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Self-hosting

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Hosting your own services. Preferably at home and on low-power or shared hardware.

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E-Mail with own domain (programming.dev)
submitted 1 day ago by Gobbel2000@programming.dev to c/selfhosting@slrpnk.net
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I was thinking about how to improve my email situation, because at the moment I am using an address of a commercial mail provider, which obviously brings some concerns of lock-in.

While fully self-hosting the email is an option, I am a bit wary of this, because having a working email is very critical and I do trust the commercial providers to give better uptime and reliability than my old server in the closet. Does anyone have experience hosting an email service and what is it like/could you recommend it?

The other option that I am more inclined to is having the email hosted by some cloud provider, but using an address under my personal domain name. The point would be of course that I could change the email provider while keeping the address. Which providers supporting this could you recommend? What is the process like linking a domain to an email host?

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[โ€“] a14o@feddit.org 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I have a very similar setup and it's been running without major hiccups for years.

I've been hearing the same tales of caution ever since I got my hands on that SUSE CD-ROM. I'm definitely much more careful when touching the setup compared to other stuff I self host, but it's not impossible or anything.

It's not something one should hurry. Read up on all the standards and documentation, set them up step by step with a throwaway domain. Avoid the big no-nos from the very beginning: Make sure to never accept relay submissions from unauthenticated users, and don't bounce anything off-server.

It's been a fun journey for me, and I always find it a bit sad when people who might be interested to learn are immediately discouraged. If you feel like giving it try, go for it!

[โ€“] keepthepace@slrpnk.net 3 points 1 day ago

Thanks, that brings some optimism! It is indeed a common wisdom that email is almost impossible to self-host. If you have some good information to dispell that myth, it would be great if you could make a post about it here!