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A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

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How reliable is it to self host SimpleLogin, AnonAddy (addy), etc? (kbin.social)

submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

9 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I have a private @gmail and a business @company.com (also via gmail), which I heavily rely on. Due to a recent data-leak somewhere, I'm now receiving unstoppable spam on my @gmail, and decided to set up a new account on proton and ditch @gmsil in favor of @example.com. I came across SimpleLogin, and thought that I could use that instead of protons custom domain feature for both @company.com and @example.com

Since I also host some stuff myself, I went through the self-hosting process of SimpleLogin, which was a pita dealing with postfix. But now, everything is running fine and I can send/receive @exampke.com emails, which I tested with @gmail and @company.com (gmail).

Even though it was a nice learning experience, I'm starting to wonder whether my setup is future proof and reliable, especially when it comes to spam. I really don't want my @company.com mails to land in customers spam folders.

So my question is, how reliable is a self hosted email-forwarding solution, and how does it compare with a self-hosted mail service. Like, are these two equal in terms when it comes to precautions etc?

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

I would have a failsafe, like use a major email provider for emails that you need to go through for like work order government stuff.

Hosting your own email is a great learning experience and is fun to do; but your emails will get marked as spam, you'll have to constantly perform maintenance, and have major reliability issues.

Most of the issues youll have are fine for personal use, but is dicey if you plan to migrate 100%

Edit: receiving email is less of an issue of sending. The forwarder should be reliable, however, its the sending from the forwarding address that would possibly be an issue.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

In my experience self hosting email it has pretty much been “set it and forget it”. I feel like there’s a lot of fud from people with misconfigured email servers (because there is a lot that can go wrong on setup). In every case I’ve seen where people are complaining about email deliverability I’ve found that they haven’t configured DKIM or rDNS properly. That doesn’t mean there can’t be issues, and I am sure it is technically possible to get sent to oblivion, but I feel like this issue might be somewhat overblown.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Yeah, I'm not that concerned about receiving, since I was able to send a mail with swaks and it came through in proton.

So, the forwarding system is basically like running an own mailserver, right?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Yea, I haven't played with it too much. You'll ever have to host your own SMTP server to send it or use gmail or protons SMTP service.

Doing it yourself might cause big companies to send your mail to spam or possibly just drop the packets cause you're not using a trusted IP, have the wrong DNS settings, etc. and your ISP may even block port 25

This can be circumvented by using a SMTP relay service but can still have some issues like mail sending limits.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Even if you are currently able to send mail without it being marked as spam, it doesn't mean it will be the case forever. If your IP gets marked as a spam sender you'll have trouble getting off that list

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters	More Letters
DNS	Domain Name Service/System
IP	Internet Protocol
SMTP	Simple Mail Transfer Protocol

3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 6 acronyms.

[Thread #196 for this sub, first seen 8th Oct 2023, 01:25] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

If your self hosting your outgoing mail, remember to setup DKIM, SFP AND DMARC.

With all that setup, you should be fine

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I don't have long term experience with either, but I started to selfhost both of them (anonaddy and simplelogin) about a month ago

I enjoy both, and both are running well at the moment - but there is no long term experience

I think , I would normally like Addy more (interface, capabilities, etc), however honestly it was the one, which caused me a lot more problems (mails getting lost unnoticed, without any notification, even multiple times - of course, in each case it was some config setting which I wasn't fully aware of, so kind of "user error). Simplelogin is running with less issues (as far as I can tell), and it's also a great piece of software: I can't even clearly explain why I use it less

Anyways, I'm very much interested in inputs on this topic, definitely look forward to discussion in this thread

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

I checked out addy too, but SL and their browser extension seem just more feature rich.