Gmail alternative: good idea to use personal domain+hosting?

I do aliases through simplelogin and have my domain hosted on mxroute.

My domain is my real last name...so I have subdomains like @myfirst.lastname.com gets pointed to simplelogin for aliases, which then forwards to mxroute. @mywifesfirst.lastname.com goes to the same simplelogin and points to her Gmail for now.

Mxroute is cheap and they've got decent web apps but really more made for traditional IMAP clients. And they don't really do groupware...just email. But that's really the hardest part, from an admin perspective.

Adminning email is getting to be a sacred art. It's a lot of work and a constant arms race both against incoming spam, and the spam filters for whoever you are sending to. A whole ton of work for what is really an essential Internet service (when I can't get into my credit card account because enom is slacking on forwarding mail, it's a problem...and also why I switched to simplelogin).

For how cheap mxroute is, IMO, absolutely not worth the effort of self-hosting unless it's actually your day job and you get some sick sadistic pleasure out of doing it on your own time.

The mxroute admin/owner himself also seems like a pretty chill guy. He's been pretty forward and transparent on Reddit and lowendbox.

Edit to add: important stuff...make sure that you have an email address that you don't host, to access stuff you need to for the stuff that you do (i.e. DNS, mail hoster, MFA provider, directory service, etc). I use a free proton for that.

stored in my hosting..

This, specifically, is the issue people are warning you about. Yes, your hosting account from Bluehost has the ability to handle email, but it's not great. It's really there just so the server can send admin emails and such, not support a full email architecture.

Simplifying - part of the way spam is detected by the servers that receive an email is to check the IP address from where it came from against a list of IP addresses known to deliver spam. If it's coming from a spam IP, the message is likely spam, so they either put it in the recipient's spam folder or fail to deliver it entirely.

Now, you may think you don't need to be worried because you're an upstanding web citizen and would never send out spam messages. However, your hosting is on a shared server, with anywhere from a handful to dozens and dozens of not hundreds of other hosting accounts, all sharing the same IP address, and they have this email ability as well. If any one of them, intentionally or unintentionally, sends out a bunch of spam messages and gets your IP address flagged, the entire server loses its reputation for some period of time. Most of the time, this is caused by people not keeping their website security up to date and their site getting infected. The malicious code then goes and sends out as many spam emails as it can before the hosting company shuts things down.

Unfortunately, you end up having very little control over the situation.

• You can ask your hosting provider to do something about your malicious/ incompetent neighbor, but they may or may not.
• You can ask to be moved to a new server, but that's just playing neighbor roulette.
• If you are able to get your hosting provider to do something about your neighbor, the other email servers in the world are still going to distrust receiving emails from your IP address for some period of time. You can make requests to try and have your IP address unflagged, that they may or may not do.
• Even if you do all the leg work of getting your server unflagged, one of your stupid neighbors could immediately get the server flagged again.

So, as others have said - yes, you can use your hosting account as your email server. But considering it's only a few bucks a month to have a dedicated email service handle it, it's generally not worth the hassle and headache.

Rolling your own email is a pain. That said, I use a VPS and host my own server with domain name and site for $5/month. Setting it up was a pain, but once you get all the records right so you're not considered spam, it works really well. That said, I haven't done anything with webmail; I strictly use IMAP and SMTP.

Hi. I used to run a mail server around ten years ago and started running it again last year.

I have three receive mail domains and one mail domain that does both. It is /so/ much harder now.

1. One domain that I let lapse for a few years is currently being impersonated by various servers.
2. There are periodic and frequent attempts to login via compromised credentials
3. Domain and IP reputation is a thing now.

The first challenge is to find a server that will let you host email but that isn’t on a spam list. Some spam lists you can apply to get off, some you can’t.

Then you have Microsoft. With Google you get thrown into spam. With Microsoft, your email just doesn’t make it. Their support is non existent.

I switched servers three times and took another month to get to Microsoft hosted inboxes. And your email is useless without Microsoft due to all the businesses that use Microsoft as a mail provider

And then if you use the mail app on iOS you quickly discover that you have to manually refresh because just on iOS, the mail app doesn’t support imap push or whatever it’s called.

I still haven’t found a good SELF hosted solution. There are third parties you can use but I don’t want to do it. There used to be a few popular solutions but development went off and on so some distros dropped it.

I’m still on Google and Apple calendar because I haven’t found a solution for that.

Of course there are solutions that encompass it all, but I am running postfix and dovecot and finally got it stable so I’m not running mailcow or whatever…

Lots of people consider it and choose not to due to the complexity involved. One of many reasons to hate email.

one more reason why self hosted email just isn't competitive with free/cheap cloud email is the client UX. Gmail is very feature rich while your self hosted email will likely run on RoundCube or SquirrelMail which are extremely barebones.

Get your own domain. Don't host your own.

I've had the same domain on gmail, proton and now purelymail.

I've been using my own cloud-hosted SMTP relay and Zimbra server for over a decade now, and I love it.

There can be a bit of a learning curve, and in some cases sites won't accept mail from cloud-hosted domains. I add those domains to a rule in sendmail that sends those domains through Amazon SES, and then they get accepted.

If you do go this route, just make sure that your recovery emails or 2FA for things like your registrar go somewhere else. If your cloud provider pulls the plug on you or something you don't want to be stuck waiting for an email that can't arrive.

I love the level of control that I have over my email and wouldn't have it any other way.

tl;dr: steep learning curve, but worth it in the long run. Keep gmail as a recovery/2FA account or something, though.

When you say hosting do you mean yourself or a company?

If a company, I do this with Dreamhost. Email hosting comes with web hosting. I might as well.

It's been a while since I last looked but I haven't read anything about whether they read my mail or not. They definitely could though.

Also their email spam filters are not very good.

Running a mail infrastructure properly is a complex problem. I would not recommend it for most people. There's a reason most companies outsource it these days.

I bought a domain name and got a web host. I set the index page to be blank and only use the web host for email. It works well. I still have gmail but try to move everything to my own domain email.

You can point your domain on any hoster like mailbox.org. There are a lot of benefits at not hosting your own mailserver.