FWIW, from what I read, the difficulty in selfhosting email is mainly in how to not get your outgoing mail insta-plonked by increasingly fussy and moody spam filters. Shows up that a huge percentage of receivers are now on gmail, trailed by a few other major players like M$, and you’re on their whimsy, with no way to appeal plonk decisions (and challenging to even find out if they plonked or not). This was reported so even before the era of “AI”, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were even harder now.

Just recently, someone wrote about https://github.com/stalwartlabs/stalwart here. It is literally an all-in-one server, so it’s quite hard to mess up.

Email itself is an unreliable delivery method, so usually, if a server cannot send an email to the recipient’s server, it puts it in a queue and tries again after some time. Therefore, a few hours of downtime won’t affect you much. Especially if you don’t need an archive of your correspondence.

So I still recommend trying to run your own full server with stalwart. At most, a couple of days of problems, and then it will work for years.

IMAP is the protocol you probably want.

I’m quite happy with “Mail In A Box” as a platform for hosting mail locally with clients.

There are companies that will do inbound spam filtering and outbound mail relaying to ensure high reputation for outgoing main also. I have clients on duocircle but they’re grandfathered in on reasonably priced plans (the new plans are probably a little expensive for self hosted home mail)

Yes, but IMAP is more common. I’ve been using Maddy for years, and it’s a fairly low-effort solution.

The fussy part in the modern era is DNS setup to ensure other providers accept mail from you, but that’s a one-time step.

POP and IMAP are still alive.

POP needs to die a painful death, in the year 2026 when you have multiple devices POP is not the answer, IMAP is the way. Sure you can self host your own email, but you will either need a static IP at home or a VPS with a static IP, than you need to make sure either one is cool with you hosting your email through there. You will need more than a week to figure things out and by the end of the week you will have pulled out all of your hair, I stopped trying going into a few days!

My suggestion however is to get someone else to host your email, the company that hosts my domain name and my VPS also hosts my email. I think I got 4 addresses with them but they have a wildcard option so that I can have infinite email address; so I can block things if they get spammy, I no longer want to see them, I no longer use their services, or I want a longer free trial which I may have done 2 or 3 times.

I’ve taken the second approach you mentioned: I own the domain, host my email with a service provider (I use Zoho Mail), and manage my DNS through Cloudflare. Here are three insights I’ve gained from this experience.

First, by managing your email provider and domain DNS separately, if you ever want to switch providers in the future, you’ll only need to update the MX and a few TXT records. Your email address will remain the same, and others won’t even notice.

Second, set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC right from the start. Be sure to enter the recipient address for DMARC aggregate reports so you can receive daily reports showing which servers are sending emails using your domain and whether they’ve passed verification.

Third, even if a new domain passes all three checks, emails sent to Outlook may still end up in the spam folder at first. This is because the new domain lacks a reputation. It’s not a configuration error, and it takes time to gradually build that reputation.

You can have a hosted e-mail system with your own domain, many service providers will do this. They would have the storage, archive, etc. on their servers. Access would be a web client, e-mail client of your choice, or a bridge demon. Option 2 is a hosted vertual server, so your self hosting but renting a VM server on a providers data center, they take care of the hardware, power, backup (sometimes depending on service), etc. You would set up your OS and e-mail services.

I use a combo of this, I have a service with my own domain and point my MX records there, I use a bridge and a sctipt to pull backups and store them locally but use their email clients for mobile and Thunderbird on PCs.

Edit: FWIW I’ve been using Proton (paid version) for this but will be moving to hosted virtual server at some point, when I get a minute to migrate. I expect the cost to be about the same

You can use imapsync to keep a local synced copy your email in maildir format. That, along with a domain you own, solves the “I own my own email sycned to my server” problem pretty much completely. Switching email providers is just syncing to the new server (which imapsync supports) and updating your MX records on your domain.

Some email clients (like aerc) can just operate on the maildir directly. That’s what I do, but there are lots of ways to do this.

One option is to just keep using your email client the way you are now talking directly to your mailserver, and just rely on the imapsync side to be your owned backup/migration path.

Alternatively you can run your own local IMAP or POP server like Dovecot backed by the local maildir. So that’s imapsync -> dovecot -> thunderbird (or similar). It’s a little more software to set up, but once it’s set up it should be very reliable and gives you total control over what email client you use and full ownership of your data.

Is there a set up where some remote service handles email exchange, and you just sync with it eg through POP style interfaces?

Yup, that’s signing up for a email provider. I wouldn’t call that self hosting since you’re just referring to email client software on your end to store the emails that are being synchronized at the email provider’s hosted server(s).

IMAP is sync so that might be what you meant. POP is even older but that’s for downloading only. And SMTP is for sending.

Those all still exist, most paid email providers still offer them just make sure to check before signing up. It’s harder to find that with free email providers, they usually disable IMAP/POP/SMTP on free accounts.

Good point, I assumed email was asynchronous on the client side but needed to be online on the server side. If it is robust to server down time that makes it easier

You can do what you want with IMAP too.

I use isync, it’s a CLI tool that can sync between IMAP accounts or between IMAP and local plain storage and it has the option to delete messages over a certain age after it copies them.

Is there a set up where some remote service handles email exchange, and you just sync with it

Any regular email provider can do this as long as it offers IMAP. I use email clients with my provider’s IMAP but I also use isync on the server to periodically pull all email locally and delete messages older than 30 days. I’ve also installed a local private IMAP server and a private webmail client on top of that private IMAP, which I use to search through old emails.

This way I normally use the “live” mailbox with my PC/mobile devices, and use the private webmail when I need to search for anything over 30 days old.

What I do is not “selfhosted email”, technically speaking, because I rely on the live IMAP and SMTP from a provider. But I can switch provider at any time because all my email is @ my custom domains, so I can simply point my DNS to another provider and update my apps to use the new provider’s IMAP/SMTP server.

POPs has a place as a protocol, even today. IMAPs is the norm but the right job needs the right tool.

MAPI is trash.

It depends what you mean by sync. There are plenty of services that will host your email server and you just connect via IMAP from all the clients.

But if you mean sync to an archive, look into openarchiver.

What about JMAP, guys? Is that cool?