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Self hosting emails in the 21th centory
→ Why self hosting emails
Mailing technology still active after decades of production. It's one of the simpliest and universal way of sharing information. There is out there a lot of very efficient solutions such gmail or protonmail.
But mail is FUN with a very broad spectrum of technology to master. For example, mailu is built over containers and targets kubernetes, it has a flask api/cli, is maintained by a prolific community using great automation tools on the continuous delivery and also bots on matrix. It has a machine learning based spam filter.
Also mail is serious with personal informations, that shall be kept secret. Hacking ofter takes place on the mailing area, and understanding how this stuff works is a great skill.
→ Available mailing selfhosted solutions
Mail In A Box (aka MIAB) looks the most advanced solution.
Mailu is quite new and it naturally comes with less features. One major distinction compared to MIAB is its configurability. Most of the modules are optional or sereval choices availables.
→ Ham & Spam
The smtp port 25 shall be opened. However most internet box close it by defaul. It is often possible to open it from the box web ui.
The reverse dnsis a huge obstacle to self host email. The domain name associated with the home ip server has to be the same as the mail domain name. Sadly most internet providers does not allow clients to change the value of rDNS (which is trivial on the cloud).
→ Using a relay
Because sending trusted email from a home server is so tricky one can use a mail provider (such riseup) to deliver the email. Also the provider can route the email to your selfhosted server. In this case, you still use your existing email, but nothing is stored on the provider side but on your own instance.
The main advantage with this is you manage your storage yourself. Also in term of privacy, your provider does not store your email history. By the way the email only transit on his side.
→ Email client
I have been using in the past multiple cli email clients such mutt, neomutt and mu4e together with local indexing tools such notmuch or mu. Those tools are not designed to work with imap but with pop. This means the emails are pulled locally and indexed.
Having a self-hosted email solution such mailu or mail in a box let use the dovecot full text searching feature based on xapian or solr. Together with the imap protocol, it leverages server search with great performances. Moreover imap is far better than pop because all your client will have the same view on the maildir, and there is no need to store locally the emails which improves security.
In the terminal, aerc is a great cli email client focused on imap and it supports server side FTS (filter -a).
On desktop, evolution also is a great software, and it provides imap push in order to get real time notifications and decrease server load.
On mobile, k9mail is great, and provides draft email encryption, autocrypt. Sadly the FTS is not yet supported. I would be glad to help on this. I have also tested fairemail, but most interesting features are limited to the paid version.
→ Calendar, contacts and tasks
Having our contacts and calendar together with the email is important. Mailu provides a simple python package radicale which brings this features. It does not come with a visual calendar, but can export vcal and ics formats. Mobile applications such etar calendar, tasks, can connect to radicale and synchronize content thought davx5.
Mail-in-a-box comes with next-cloud calendar which is a more complete solution but too heavy for my taste.
Roundcube webmail is able to connect to radicale carddav feature only. Sadly it does not provide any decent calendar plugin.
