this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2025
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41
On email privacy: can I store my own email and relay them through an email provider? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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This is coming from a general perspective of wanting more privacy and seeing news of Mozilla creating an email service "which will definitely not train AI on your email". Sure Mozilla, whatever you say.

Rant aside, here's my question: is it possible to store all of your email on your own infrastructure (VPS or even NAS at home) and simply using an encrypted relay to send emails out to the public internet? My idea is that this removes the problems of keeping your IP whitelisted from the consumer, but the email provider doesn't actually hold your emails. This means your emails remain completely in your control, but you don't have to worry about not being able to send emails to other people as long as your storage backend is alive.

I don't know much about email to comment on what this would take. I think something similar is already possible with an SMTP relay from most email providers, but the problem is that my email also resides on their servers. I don't like that. I want my email to live on my servers alone.

Do you think this is possible? Does any company already do this?

Thanks

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I previously looked into doing exactly this, and recall this comment on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31245923

One could argue the price of smtp2go at $150/yr is a bit steep, but it would also neatly avoid issues with sending outbound mail, since you're paying them to deal with those headaches. For inbound mail, I can't see why any mail operator wouldn't deliver to the server designated by your MX records, though you'll also have to deal with spam and other concerns vis-a-vis self hosting.

On the same thread but different comment, VPS operators might already run an SMTP server that you can relay through.

I wish you good luck in this endeavor!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 17 hours ago

Thanks. After speaking with some others here, I've realised that this is actually quite doable (in theory). The other commenter has a great note on DKIM and SPF that I'm sure will help anyone looking to do this. Thanks for your help, I've also found a lot of companies offering a free SMTP server for a limited number of emails (which is more emails than I'll ever send so it works for me).