this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2025
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35
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]
22 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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] 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Amazing comment. Saved. Thank you so much.

Indeed, I have thought about hosting my own email, but the problem of dealing with IP blacklists made it seem not worth it.

Thank you so much for the explanation on DKIM and SPF. It makes sense to me now, indeed I didn't really have a clue about either of these before I read your comment. Thank you for breaking it down.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

I use sendgrid as my outgoing smtp relay to avoid ip reputation issues you mention. You still have to configure your dns settings for spf and dkim pointing at their servers instead of yours. Their free tier is 10x the email I’ll ever send so it doesn’t cost anything. There are a few companies in this space with free tiers. It works, but it isnt Gmail level deliverability. I still get spam binned occasionally.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 17 hours ago

The previous commenter mentioned mxroute and I got sendgrid from your comment. I will look at these products, is there any other provider that you recommend?