Basically, I’d like to have my own domain e.g onlinepersona@mydomain.com but not go through the hassle of hosting my own email service: I’d like to use another service that handled SPF, DMARC, and whatever else for me, grab the emails from their service using POP, and make it available to my email client on android and Linux using IMAP. SMTP will be through the third party.

This way, if the third party starts doing some bullshit like trying to lock me in, donating to a dickhead, or whatever else I disagree with, I can cancel my subscription, move to another third party, and keep all mails on my server.

How can I achieve this? Which search terms should I be using? “Self host email server” brings up stuff that’s the equivalent of self-hosting gmail, AOL, posteo, kollabnow, or whatever, but that’s not what I want. “Selfhost POP relay” doesn’t have much better results, always bringing up SMTP relay…

  • IsoKiero@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    2·
    18 days ago

    You can run a dovecot (or any IMAP server) where ever you want and use fetchmail to pull data from POP-server into it. There’s plenty of discussion and instructions around the web so I won’t copy’n’paste them here, search for ‘fetchmail dovecot’ or something similar.

    • Suzune@ani.socialEnglish
      1·
      17 days ago

      That’s what I do, too. My Dovecot is at home and I collect emails from all my accounts using fetchmail.

      Nice thing is Dovecot Pidgeonhole for Sieve and Flatcurve for ultrafast indexing and search.

  • bahntiger@scribe.disroot.orgEnglish
    1·
    17 days ago

    Three possible scenarios against “vendor lockin” in my opinion

    • use fetchmail and dovecot as described better by the other posts here
    • use imap on your third party and make regular backups using offlineimap (if using linux…). Tools like this should exist for other OSes too
    • use imap on your third party. When you are no longer satisfied get yourself a new party, and transfer the whole shebang with imapsync. As long as the mails are accessible via IMAP, youre good to go.

    Myself i’m using offlineimap as a systemd-timer in background continously and imapsync last time i switched from my own mailserver to a third party solution. Both work like a charm.