Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?

• ImapSync

  134 3,185 2.9 Perl

  Imapsync is an IMAP transfers tool. The purpose of imapsync is to migrate IMAP accounts or to backup IMAP accounts. IMAP is one of the three current standard protocols to access mailboxes, the two others are POP3 and HTTP with webmails, webmails are often tied to an IMAP server. Upstream website is

  

• got-your-back

  86 2,500 7.6 Python

  Got Your Back (GYB) is a command line tool for backing up your Gmail messages to your computer using Gmail's API over HTTPS.

  

I did a bunch of research on this earlier this year. I really do enjoy GMail, even if it is technically a cloud service. So, I split the difference on this one. I use a gmail account as "primary", but I still have my own domain for email inboxes. The best option I found is to have my own domain (e.g. at Hover) and then have the MX Servers managed by Cloudflare's new product, email routing. That's described here[1] and here[2]. What's nice about this setup: you have your own domain; you can setup custom forwarding rules; all email flows to a single GMail inbox. So then your only concern is backup and email export. For this, I setup automation with a script called got-your-back[3], a nice Python script that can archive your GMail account and restore it to another account.

[1]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-email-routing/

[2]: https://www.cloudflare.com/products/email-routing/

[3]: https://github.com/GAM-team/got-your-back

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• Mail-in-a-Box

  183 13,286 8.8 Python

  Mail-in-a-Box helps individuals take back control of their email by defining a one-click, easy-to-deploy SMTP+everything else server: a mail server in a box.

  

I've hosted my own email for over 30 years. I've watched it slowly change from a (somewhat) trusted environment into a war zone. Administration time went from nearly nothing to several hours per day up until about five years ago.

For the past five years I've been using mail-in-a-box. (http://mailinabox.email)

• Mailcow

  180 7,931 9.5 JavaScript

  mailcow: dockerized - 🐮 + 🐋 = 💕

  

I use G Suite nowadays, but I used to self-host up until a couple years ago. Mailcow is (or at least was) pretty nice and reliable: https://github.com/mailcow/mailcow-dockerized

Suggest a related project