What are the practical advantages to owning your own email server and not using something like proton? Maybe I’m just not a heavy user of email but I’m struggling to find use cases that aren’t mostly ideological.
- Another step up in security: ProtonMail can still read unencrypted incoming email. With self-hosting, you only have to trust your hosting provider.
- Better IMAP support: ProtonMail doesn't support IMAP without the ProtonMail bridge. The ProtonMail bridge was very buggy for me, and I have to self-host it anyways. With self-hosted email, I can just use IMAP normally (yay).
- Better email search: With ProtonMail you can search for keywords in the message body but it doesn't work if you have lots of mail. With self-hosting you can search however you like across as much mail as you like.
- Easier backups: On my self-hosted setup I can configure automated periodic backups. I don't think that's possible on ProtonMail.
- Cost: ProtonMail is really expensive :(
The main reason I switched was the IMAP part. I just got tired of the bridge bugs.
Mainly control. You can set your own policies, such as deciding which ban lists to use. I have a backup server in another continent. It’s far less likely to have my account deacitivated for a mysterious reason by (both) my hosting providers than some email hosting company. So I feel that my access to email is more assured. I can have an infinity of ad-hoc email addresses and set any routing, or run any program on the server, based on the recipient address.
One less dependency that may suddenly change or vanish with little or no warning, causing you to drop your planned work and react to its whims.
Also if you're already paying for IP service, there is no technical reason you should have to pay an email provider. Email standards and software are all open and free.
Unless a message needs no other email service provider to be delivered, your attachment sizes are still subject to other providers' limits.
Yes, you can log the crap out of "$Server.$OtherProvider.$TLD accepted $MessageID for delivery" - but that doesn't stop $OtherProvider from failing to deliver it to the recipient's IN box.
For me, it's that all data that resides within the received email is mine. There's no outside force pre-scanning my receiving emails to display advertisements.
I can create as many alias, mailboxes I prefer.
Overall the freedom is soothing.
I to have never had emails denied but then again I'm using colocation based hosting, so my IP block is one that's never been used before.
The reason why I host my own email service is that I can have a wildcard address, that no provider (that I know) offers. So that I can use whatever address@mydomain that I want, without creating an alias in the mail server.
For this reason I can have a different address for each service that I register with, for example facebook@domain, and thus easily block services that start spamming out, and even know if a service leaks my address without authorization.
Yes, I know that GMail has a similar feature (by using address+whatever@gmail.com) but some sites blocks it, and still you don't have that ability to have a completely different address, that if one day you want can become its own mailbox.
Another reason is that commercial email services started blocking the simple SMTP/IMAP authentication with username/password, making it difficult, if not impossible, to configure a server them to send email trough GMail or Outlook, or a service to subscribe trough IMAP subscription to the mailbox to trigger an action when a mail arrives. Proton even decided not to support plain SMTP/IMAP, and you need a bridge to use it!
All my systems, being them servers or services that run on them, are configured to send the email trough my server, and the configuration is super easy. So that, for example, I'm notified if a cron job fails (basically the mail to the local Linux users gets routed to my server) or I have my Home Assistant installation notify me trough email.
Next I manage different domains, and I can have all that domains in a single central mail server. That allows to manage the mail of different systems in a central place, and with a single account. As far as I know this is not possible with commercial services: what you can do is of course to have one system forward the mail to another, but to send the mail as another domain with the same mailbox? With my mailserver I can, I just configure multipe FROM addresses in Thunderbird.
Finally on my server I don't have a limit on the number of accounts/mailbox, so I create an account/mailbox for whatever reason I want in two seconds, for a fixed montly cost (of around 10 euros, since I use the smallest AWS EC2 that they have available)
As you see, there are plenty of reasons to have your own mail service.
And, and let's conclude with: I've lost more mails thanks to antispam in commercial email software such as Outlook or GMail, that on my own server. I don't care about spam, I (if needed) know how to filter it out client-side. I don't want systems to refuse or even hide messages to me, something GMail and Outlook does.
