Comment by knadh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by knadh | Hacker News Reader

I've had a personal e-mail ID on a custom domain for a long time that I've connected to everything from self-hosted setups to several providers including GMail. The web UIs have never been an issue thanks to Thunderbird.

Last year, I switched to ProtonMail (Thunderbird on Linux with their "bridge" client). Works flawlessly, spam classification works well alongside Thunderbird's junk classification, and the mobile app is pretty slick too.

Anecdotal experience being, a local client like Thunderbird (mine still has e-mails from 18+ years ago) + whatever provider via IMAP/POP has been a rock solid setup that has withstood time. It might not be wise to trust any cloud e-mail provider in the long run.

I have a similar setup, but I find the bridge doesn't seem to auto-start correctly, and then Thunderbird generates a bunch of connection errors that I have to manually clear out after manually launching the bridge.

I've been looking at moving to self-hosted personal email. I'm curious did you have any deliverability issues with your setup? That's my biggest area of concern.

You shouldn't have any deliverability issues unless you're sending bulk mail. You may have to bother some mail admins if they have bad IP blocklist rules. Most mail providers are fast to respond if you're having delivery issues to them. Except for Zoho. Encourage people with Zoho to switch mail providers.

Or if you’re not the type to email randos on the internet it’s not that hard to piggyback off of ses, sendgrid, postmark, etc.. Might defeat the point of self-hosting for you but at that point at least you own your data.

It’s possible to achieve good deliverability with some effort. Proper SMTP config and a “clean” dedicated IP from a host with no history of spamming. I gave up on the Postfix/Dovecot setup when I switched hosts and figured I’d just rely on a dedicated provider. At the end of the day, with a local client, the email provider is merely a pluggable relay.

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