OK.
I'll bite.
I have an account with a Canadian web server host, https://stormweb.ca/
I used to have a cheap account there and forward all my email to mail
sites.
I hosted it at home for a while, years ago, with one of those DNS
services that changes the IP for your URL to your home IP, with a tool
on my always-on desktop that notices new IP addresses and tells the
service. I think those services disappeared?
Anyway, I set up Echlin.ca on Stormweb.ca, and I pay them $200/yr for
hosting plus $29 per year for echlin.ca.
They take care of a lot of stuff.
I added forwarding from alice@ and appsec@ to rob [ at ] echlin [ dot ] ca.
I had issues with my email bouncing, a few years ago.
I had to tell specific people sending stuff to me to tell Microsoft to
take me off black lists. I don't think I contacted MS directly.
I think I emailed one black list group 5 to 10 years ago. Once.
That has not happened again for at least a couple years.
That means I am paying just under $20 per month. I may want to save a
bit off that, but this way, my >5 yr old laptops are not mission
critical. I can get my mail from my phone or a replacement laptop, as
long as I can use my password manager.
Cheers!
Alice was Rob,eh?
On 2026-10-03 16:47, Ian! D. Allen via linux wrote:
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.
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