A personal e-mail solution?

[asquirrel]

I've spent the past week googling, trying to find a consensus about e-mail hosting. /r/privacy worships at the altar of encrypted e-mail, and I want to keep using Thunderbird, so that's out.

 

What do I really want? I want an e-mail host that will only require a username and password to log in via either IMAP or POP3 from anywhere in the world. No SMS. No two factor, none of this BS. Username, password, done.

 

Why do I want this? I travel a fair bit. Recently (past year or so) google has started preventing me from logging into my e-mail accounts even when I use cell data in my own friggin apartment, instead of wifi! Or when my ISP changes my IP! Rant:

Spoiler

It's infuriating that google, vacuum of all data, demands I set up two factor authentication when they know that in the last 10 years I have been hacked exactly 0 times (I always push the 'it was me' button, and it has never been anything that wasn't me!). They just want a phone number so they can sell it. This isn't about security.

I am not a business, I don't rely on being able to send mail, but I do rely on being able to read it.

 

Can anyone give me a minimum-viable-cost plan for solving the e-mail problem once and for all? I have run my own postfix server for the last 5 years, so I'm leaning toward the path of just buying a VPS/Shared hosting solution, a DNS name, and running my mail server that way. If I had a hosting solution with some sort of reliable console level access (IPMI/KVM console/etc) then I can troubleshoot pretty much anything. It also seems like I'll still need to pay someone if I want a reliable way to send e-mail, due to blacklisting of IPs. Zoho may be the best option for that, or mxroute?

 

Plan details I'm trying to nail down or have nailed down (feel free to comment on any of them.)

• DNS name: namecheap
• Certs: letsencrypt
• Shared hosting / VPS / etc: ?? Need input. Minimum requirement is to run postfix (no webmail client).
• Storage needs: I plan to download all mail from the server ASAP. 100MB or less would probably be all the storage I'd actually need for postfix.

 

Other thoughts:

MXroute's $100 for life option is tempting, but two things prevent me from just using that:

1. I have no way to know if they pull the same bullshit gmail does of requiring SMS verification when I sign in from a new IP (this is NOT a fucking feature! I do not want it!)
2. Their support seems to be of the mindset that if you have an issue and want them to actually support you, then they are just going to ban your account for daring to want a reasonable response time on support. *Maybe* all the bad posts about them are just Karens. *Maybe* they really are a company not worth making a $100 bet on.

Zoho has the same problem gmail does. It wants a phone number for e-mail. No. No goddamnit. Username, password, done. I want to be able to go to some seedy internet cafe in bumfuck nowhere Djibouti after my phone is stolen and still be able to check my e-mail! Let me deal with the security ramifications myself!

[mariushm]

I'm using Fastmail.com  5$+vat plan with a domain that's using the namecheap dns.

Ask them about login stuff ...

[Pickles von Brine]

Why not just go with name.com and use their email service there? They use imap. Also, why do you not want two factor authentication? It is really important to have that. 

For my domain I pay 12.99 a month and then 2 bucks a month for email. 

[mariushm]

6 minutes ago, Pickles - Lord of the Jar said:

For my domain I pay 12.99 a month and then 2 bucks a month for email. 

A domain name typically costs 15$ a year ( talking about .com, .net , .org etc ) ... if you pay monthly that much without some added services like hosting, they're screwing you.

 

Another option you have is to get a cheap vps (10-20$ a month) and set up a mail server on it and with a domain name of your own you're in full control.

I've used a windows dedicated server with hMailServer free mail server for years, with mailboxes on multiple domain names but got tired of deleting spam mail and setting up rules to auto delete mails based on keywords and moved to fastmail.com like i said.

 

[Pickles von Brine]

1 minute ago, mariushm said:

A domain name typically costs 15$ a year ( talking about .com, .net , .org etc ) ... if you pay monthly that much without some added services like hosting, they're screwing you.

 

Another option you have is to get a cheap vps (10-20$ a month) and set up a mail server on it and with a domain name of your own you're in full control.

I've used a windows dedicated server with hMailServer free mail server for years, with mailboxes on multiple domain names but got tired of deleting spam mail and setting up rules to auto delete mails based on keywords and moved to fastmail.com like i said.

 

Sorry I mistyped. I just checked my domain. I pay 13 a year for the domain and 2 bucks a month for email. 

[asquirrel]

4 minutes ago, mariushm said:

...

Another option you have is to get a cheap vps (10-20$ a month) and set up a mail server on it and with a domain name of your own you're in full control.

...

This was my plan. The thing is, I'm totally new to VPS hosting. I see digital ocean offering $5/mo droplets, but there is that saying "You get what you pay for" and what I don't know is how much is 'enough'. You and I both know that a Ryzen 7 AM4 CPU for $100 is a scam (or pricing typo), but I don't have that same level of knowledge for VPS hosting. I don't know what it 'should' cost, and how cheap is too cheap, and how expensive is just wasting money.

[Kilrah]

1 hour ago, mariushm said:

Another option you have is to get a cheap vps (10-20$ a month) and set up a mail server on it and with a domain name of your own you're in full control.

I did run my own server in the past but nowadays it's not a good option anymore. If you don't go through one of the "known big" you tend to be blacklisted by default from many places.

[mariushm]

6 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

I did run my own server in the past but nowadays it's not a good option anymore. If you don't go through one of the "known big" you tend to be blacklisted by default from many places.

Only if you don't set stuff like DomainKeys properly, and set reverse dns (the datacenter will do it for free if the option is not there in control panel or whatever)

Indeed, even with all these rules properly configured, sometimes big players act up ... for example Yahoo had a habit of sometimes holding mails I sent in limbo for a few hours (randomly "rate limiting" my IP address even though I sent a handful of emails to yahoo addresses at most each day)

[SansVarnic]

@asquirrel This might interest you.

https://www.thehelm.com/