I have to ask this. Is there a service where I could bring my own FQN like Notgoogle.com and then have them handle emails for me? But with a twist… I want notgoogle.com to send and receive emails via that outside entity, but I want to send the emails from a self hosted server that maybe has mailcow or similar and I want that same server to receive the emails from the outside company. Ideally the outside company is basically just a relay from my IP to the outside world and vise versa. The outside company would basically hold the emails until my server checked and downloaded them. any advice on this. Hopefully with a useful step by step guide from somewhere in the webs?

  • Ferawyn@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    11 days ago

    Email is the one thing I have stopped trying to do myself. It just has too many things that you absolutely need to keep updated. Have a look at Forward Email (https://forwardemail.net/en). They can hook up to pretty much any domain setup you already have, and do the heavy lifting for you.

    • werefreeatlast@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      11 days ago

      Yeah same here. I just want to catch the emails as one would from Thunderbird but be able to share one account with my wife but without having to rely on keeping our emails on their server… That’s the current gmail problem, our emails are on there, they decide to train their AI or whatever with the emails and they just email you an opt out. I’m done with that. Worst is that you can’t quickly delete nor save and backup anything.

      • Ferawyn@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        9 days ago

        For backing up your email from gmail or any other provider, check out MailStore Home edition: https://www.mailstore.com/en/products/mailstore-home/ It will grab everything in the account and store it locally, and then allow you to push it back onto any other imap service when necessary. Great for migrating your email, and keeping a just-in-case backup.

  • rcbrk@lemmy.mlEnglish
    4·
    11 days ago
    • For incoming mail, on your server run a mail retrieval agent like fetchmail to fetch mail from the externally hosted mailbox into a maildir on your server.
    • To serve that maildir to your clients, on your server run a mail delivery agent like the IMAP server Dovecot.
    • To accept outgoing mail from your clients, on your server run something like Postfix with a relayhost configured with the details of your externally hosted SMTP server.

    There’s nothing unusual or tricky about any of this arrangement.

  • uranibaba@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    11 days ago

    I would never handle email myself. I would instead use a provider, turn off all filters and set up a mail server locally that works via the provider.
    That way I don’t have to convince my ISP to set up a PTR for me, handle DMARC or SPF. Or care if my IP is blacklisted.

  • smb@lemmy.mlEnglish
    11·
    12 days ago

    hm, sounds like literally any regular webhosting service that also offers email (like every such service i know of) to me, then maybe used together with imap (or pop, if you wish), and if you want to connect servers with it to send mails, then “smarthost” or “sattelite system” should be the configuration you are looking for for your own MTA. to get received emails from that service most common is to use pop3 (still common because seemingly every service offers it for compatibility) but other protocols would be faster like immediate recieve using notify within imap, and there are other options too, but those depends on what that service offers like maybe sending your mails once received by them to your own server via smtp or by other protocols depending on what they implemented. i think there is no “twist” with that and -what i understand of what you want - is a quite common thing.

    i for myself don’t want 3rd parties to be able to directly read my emails so i run my own mail server as tiny rented VMs from providers while my real emailserver is my homeserver that uses these VMs as “smarthost” and also pulls emails from there immediately. my mailclients are configured to connect to those VMs butbthat connection is relayed through VPN to my homeserver. thus i think my setup is a bit like what you want but i host everything by myself and i don’t use mailcow but it looks like i use the same software mailcow uses too. i guess you are mainly bound to what mailcow offers when limiting yourself to it ;-)

  • just_another_person@lemmy.worldEnglish
    14·
    12 days ago

    Big nope. It’s not a technical hurdle, it’s a viability problem. Just search on why you should never host your own SMTP service.