I’m tempted to move to email with my own domain, but don’t really care about the server side of things, I guess I’m following the line that self hosted email is not easy to do, and not sure how reliable I can make my servers.
The other option is to have some other system do the email hosting, and if it is through my domain then there should be no issues with moving around if needed. Hosting all the email archive isn’t really needed either, I’d be fine self hosting or storing the archive.
Is there a set up where some remote service handles email exchange, and you just sync with it eg through POP style interfaces? Id actually prefer if my own server was doing the sync rather than a desktop running Thunderbird etc, that way it is kind of self hosted but also robust to down time. What’s the best practice along these lines?
Can confirm. Stalwart is really nice. They very recently released their 1.0 version. It was a couple days of issues, then later I broke it again for a few days. Other that that, the server hosting end of it has been very smooth. There is another project that goes well with it called Bulwark. The pair of those have been stable and reliable for me for months now.
How does it work with network security, do you need to have a SMTP port open to the net?
That would depend on your deployment set up. I do not do that, but many people do. I have a very bespoke ingress route that I coded myself. It consists of a serverless cloudflare edge worker to catch emails, break them into a JSON that is sent over a tunnel to cloudflared as a post. This post is directed at containerized python program that rebuilds the email and that container is the only thing with access to deliver mail to the container running stalwart.
The reason I do this is not security though. It was a personal project more or less to see if it could be done and if it was reliable. Particularly to see if i could make a secure delivery method to bypass my ISPs CGNAT without paying for and maintaining a VPS. So far so good. And it has no monthly fee.
Most people I know of (with CGNAT limitations) are just using a cheap VPS with open ports and then the VPS either has the email server there or a tunnel to the SMTP server. If you have a static IP or a DDNS set up where you can properly port forward, that works too.
What does Bulwark do? Link?
https://bulwarkmail.org/ it’s a web mail client that can fully utilize jmap with Stalwart. Its very snappy and the maintainer is very active. They also put together a good android native client and they are working on one for iOS.