Is for this reason that my email is hosted on a cheap VPS:

https://gioorgi.com/2020/mail-server-on-docker/ https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver

It is very easy to set up (just a bit of time on average every 6 month to follow upgrades) and work out of the box.

Europe outlook users are experiencing problems too.

When your most important contacts use outlook, it does not matter what you do. Sending and receiving email when almost nobody else is sending and receiving is only small help.

Some problems are not solved by individual choice. If 30-40% of your important contacts use service that is down, your ability to work goes down dramatically.

I have currently important 3 daily contacts down they use MS services extensively contacted and said they can't do much of anything because their work process and the process of their contacts is down.

	▲	mahboi a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Enough of my contacts use Gmail. But both of these have more uptime than my self-hosted email.
	▲	tonyedgecombe a day ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		If the person I'm contacting is using Outlook then I assume it's going to be unreliable anyway.
	▲	vachina a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Personal email is almost exclusively for OTP, reminders/invoice.

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PennRobotics a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I dunno...

Wouldn't you then need to keep up-to-date backups but ensure the backups still stay secure? Learn all about and generate SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records but still regularly get sent to the spam folder or IP blacklists if your recipient has a big-provider email? Deal with self-rolled 2FA or passkeys and secure recovery methods. If you're self-hosting at your house, you're at the whims of nature, infrastructure, and creatures not disturbing the machine. You are the one patching security holes, or if you run someone else's containerized or easy-setup mail server, making the decision between daily updates that'll catch supply chain attacks and potentially introduce instability or new security holes; or monthly/annual/never updates that virtually ensure you have a few CVEs active at all times; or the lead maintainer quits/dies and you watch it deteriorate while users groupthink how to migrate their mail to a different container.

Sorry for the pessimism. I can't suggest a better alternative. I have one account on Gmail (for impersonal communication like shopping) and another on Fastmail and occasionally reflect on how annoying it will be to lose access to either.

	▲	cube00 a day ago \| parent [-]
		>Learn all about and generate SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records but still regularly get sent to the spam folder or IP blacklists if your recipient has a big-provider email? This is my biggest complaint when self hosting. You do everything right and they still send your mail to junk or just silently discard it while telling you 250-Ok for "reasons". Although I recently had a legit Microsoft email also end up in the junk folder so I feel better that they can't even get it right themselves. Microsoft have also recently kicked out self hosters from their "Smart Network Data Services" portal by only allowing the ASN owner (ie. your cloud provider) to access it.

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theK a day ago | parent | prev [-]

There probably are some very good reasons not to self host your email server but apparently my own, self hosted, email server's uptime over the last decade is now better than that of outlook.com :-D

Quick lets collect all options people have to self host! in addition to docker-mailserver im aware of

- https://github.com/stalwartlabs/stalwart

- https://github.com/mailcow/mailcow-dockerized

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heavensteeth a day ago | parent | next [-]

I decided to self-host my mail a few weeks ago and ran through all of the big names I'd heard - Mailcow, mailinabox, Stalwart, and Dovecot+Postfix; honestly I didn't like any of them. Stalwart is very corpo, hard to configure (reading the docs[0] confused the shit out of me), and feels vibe-coded. Mailcow and miab push a huge stack onto you in a way that feels hard to modify yourself, e.g. expecting you to allocate ~2GB ram(?) to running ClamAV, and I never managed to get Dovecot+Postfix working properly.

In the end I paved over my Linux VM with OpenBSD and used Dovecot+OpenSMTPD which I found dead simple and so far faultless. I have nothing but kind words for it.

[0] https://stalw.art/docs/configuration/

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theK a day ago | parent [-]

That's fair. It is perfectly reasonable to want customizability if control is what you are after. I remember the days fondly where I was running postfix and dovecot on bare metal.

Nowadays my interests have skewed towards being able to have groupware features without much maintenance so groupware in a box suits my needs just fine. The learning curve to doing serious customization with a large FOSS groupware project might be a bit longer but that is offset by other factors.

	▲	heavensteeth a day ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah I definitely get less done on OpenBSD, but I have more fun doing it, and fortunately in my position where that works for me. If I were providing a service to others instead of just myself I'd have to rethink my stack.

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Geezus_42 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Mailcow's README is garbage. It tells me nothing about the software while asking for $50-100/m.

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theK a day ago | parent [-]

> Mailcow's README is garbage.

Geez, that's right! :-D

It seems to be a fairly popular project though, so what does that say about the correlation of README.md quality to success?

	▲	Geezus_42 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I have heard good things. It says that whether or not the README is good does not correlate with the popularity of the project.