I have a shared web/email host in the USA for idallen.ca. (I got a $4/month deal for WHM with 10GB many years ago.) EMail goes there, but only for a minute or two. They use MailChannels and have SpamAssassin. Their server is "always" up to receive and store my incoming email. Every few minutes I use fetchmail with IMAP at home to pull all my eamil off that idallen.ca mail host, run it through my own local SpamAssassin, file it locally on disk in Maildir format, and index it with "notmuch". So an incoming email message is stored on the USA server only for a few minutes, unless my home isn't fetching email for whatever reason. (I could forward email to home from the USA server, to avoid the fetchmail polling wait, but then if home is down for any length of time that queued forwarded email would eventually bounce. Not what I want.) At home, with "notmuch" I have full-text, xapian-indexed archives of all my email since the mid-1980s (36G of index). Searching is instant. I send email from home via that same USA email host, and they use MailChannels to send outgoing email, so it doesn't look like my email came from my home machine. Rarely, MailChannels gives me a false "spam: rejected" for some message I try to send, and I can log in to MailChannels and ask them to fix that. (Reporting copies of spam messages to organizations is tricky; I have to contact MailChannels and ask them to allow the organization spam receiving address to receive my spam report, otherwise trying to report spam is blocked as spam.) Advantages of using external hosting but having local storage: - Essentially unlimited storage. - No ads. - Email to idallen.ca is "always" received, "never" bounced, "never" lost. Their servers have backups and people watching them 24 hours a day. - No need to pay for huge cloud email storage. My email only "piles up" in the cloud for a few minutes, or maybe a few hours, days, or weeks if I decide to shut down home. I don't *store* any email in the cloud; all the messages just pass through to home. - When home is down and I can't ssh in to read email, I just read email via the web interface on their server until home is back up again. Disadvantages (of current arrangement) - I need my own domain name. - I need to pay for a cloud server to receive email for my domain. - If home is down, I can read new email on the web but I have no access to previous messages (which are all stored at home). - When home comes back up, all that stored email is pulled home and removed from the server, but if I've already read it on the web then I have to handle it all over again at home. (I never delete messages using the web interface, because I want that email pulled home for archiving and indexing.) - I'm receiving each message of my incoming email as cleartext on a server in the USA for a few minutes. That's better than having *all* my email sitting on a USA server, but it's not ideal. - Each message I send goes via this USA server, so the outgoing message is queued in cleartext on some USA server for a minute or two before MailChannels sends it on to wherever. Not ideal. On Sat, Oct 03, 2026 at 10:33:59AM -0400, Dianne Skoll via linux wrote: > I guess not many people self-host their email any more. :( > I self-host mine. My MX host is a virtual machine hosted at OVH, and > my actual mail storage server (IMAP) is a Raspberry Pi with a couple > of large USB disks attached. It's about 2 metres from where I'm > sitting. > Advantages of self-hosting: > - Essentially unlimited storage > - No ads > - I'd know for sure if a government agency got a court order to look > at my mail server. :) > - Mail hosted in Canada > Disadvantages: > - You need a strategy to deal with spam > - Deliverability can be tricky > - You need your own domain name > - Realistically, you need a hosted server to act as your MX host > For me, the advantages are worth it. I have archives of all my mail since > 1991. :) > Regards, > Dianne. > To unsubscribe send a blank message to linux+unsubscribe [ at ] linux-ottawa [ dot ] org > To get help send a blank message to linux+help [ at ] linux-ottawa [ dot ] org > To visit the archives: https://lists.linux-ottawa.org -- | Ian! D. Allen, BA-Psych, MMath-CompSci idallen [ at ] idallen [ dot ] ca Ottawa CANADA | Home: www.idallen.com Contact Improvisation Dance: www.contactimprov.ca | Former college professor of Free/Libre GNU+Linux @ teaching.idallen.com | Improve democracy www.fairvote.ca and defend digital freedom www.eff.org To unsubscribe send a blank message to linux+unsubscribe [ at ] linux-ottawa [ dot ] org To get help send a blank message to linux+help [ at ] linux-ottawa [ dot ] org To visit the archives: https://lists.linux-ottawa.org