/r/selfhosted are not big Cloudron fans
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Yeah, I gave up on homelabs long ago too.
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I am active there . r/selfhosted is self hosting enthusiasts and tinkerers. There was a survey a while ago about the users and a veyr big chunk was mostly people trying to learn devops/k8s and it doesn't matter if thigns break and you have to start over. Given the personal and education use space, it has a bias for "free" as in beer stuff. Nothing wrong with all this, just giving some context around that sub . It's a great sub for discovering new projects and getting some tips here and there (off late, the technical users have dried up a lot though) . Depending on the mood of the day, you might even get downvoted if suggesting using a VPS btw
It's because they are much in the homelab and hosting with laptops on a private lan .An anomaly in all this is that they are vehemently against selfhosting email (you can search for various threads)
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While I'm in favor of self hosting a lot of apps, I am also panicked by the idea of self hosting email which I consider more secure in the hands of FastMail than on my VPS
@SansGuidon each to their own, I guess.
I've been self hosting all my email since starting to use Cloudron about 5 or 6 years ago and it most works great
I'm not sure, but I think most of us here are self hosting our email
(and the fact that we can use Cloudron for that is one of its USPs - none of the other alternatives offer a full email server etc out of the box).
I'm personally not too bothered about email security given
- unencrpyped emails are like postcards - anyone can read them in transit, and
- nearly all emails are read by Big Tech anyway (just because even if you're self-hosting most people you're emailing won't be - they'll be using Google or M$).
Email and security don't really go together. If you need to communicate something securely, don't use email.
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I really want to self host email ideally but I've read many times in privacy/self-hosting communities it is not so easy nor recommended to want to do that yourself, and I feel it is complicated to do well -> scam/spam management, server reputation, and good automation/UX etc. I want ideally to take too much on my plate. I feel like it is a job in itself to administrate an email server and all the tooling around it, if you want to provide an experience that is as nice as Gmail/FastMail & the likes. But I hope to be wrong. What I liked with Gmail/Fastmail and the likes is the ease of administrating the various options via the web interface, without being too tech savy. I'm not ready to give up on this user web experience also I wouldn't know where to start to make my email server as secure and safe as the popular privacy focused solutions.
What do you use for yourself?
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I really want to self host email ideally but I've read many times in privacy/self-hosting communities it is not so easy nor recommended to want to do that yourself, and I feel it is complicated to do well -> scam/spam management, server reputation, and good automation/UX etc. I want ideally to take too much on my plate. I feel like it is a job in itself to administrate an email server and all the tooling around it, if you want to provide an experience that is as nice as Gmail/FastMail & the likes. But I hope to be wrong. What I liked with Gmail/Fastmail and the likes is the ease of administrating the various options via the web interface, without being too tech savy. I'm not ready to give up on this user web experience also I wouldn't know where to start to make my email server as secure and safe as the popular privacy focused solutions.
What do you use for yourself?
@SansGuidon said in /r/selfhosted are not big Cloudron fans:
What do you use for yourself?
Cloudron. No email server administration required. It's all just baked in.
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Yeah I dunno, when checking the docs (https://docs.cloudron.io/email/) about the email server for Cloudron, I find already some dead links like https://docs.cloudron.io/api/ , the web mails I see listed seem outdated in term of UX and look more like toys than like serious alternatives to webmails clients I'm used to.
Now I do not say it is bad, I'm however interested in shared experiences of how to migrate to this. With Fastmail it was really easy (a few seconds) to migrate from Gmail and sync everything contacts/calendars/emails and rules, signatures, etc. However for Cloudron, is there any docs related to this? -
thanks @nebulon! while you edit those parts, some other dead external links found on same page:
http://www.lashback.com/blacklist
http://dnsbl.sorbs.netand a dead internal link:
https://docs.cloudron.io/guides/community/smtp-relay-configuration.md -
Yeah I dunno, when checking the docs (https://docs.cloudron.io/email/) about the email server for Cloudron, I find already some dead links like https://docs.cloudron.io/api/ , the web mails I see listed seem outdated in term of UX and look more like toys than like serious alternatives to webmails clients I'm used to.
Now I do not say it is bad, I'm however interested in shared experiences of how to migrate to this. With Fastmail it was really easy (a few seconds) to migrate from Gmail and sync everything contacts/calendars/emails and rules, signatures, etc. However for Cloudron, is there any docs related to this?@SansGuidon said in /r/selfhosted are not big Cloudron fans:
the web mails I see listed seem outdated in term of UX and look more like toys than like serious alternatives to webmails clients I'm used to.
Yeah, this is the biggest issue IMHO. None of the open source webmail clients are really up to scratch. But they are all usable. I mostly use SnappyMail but it does have some glitches and every now and then I go over to Roundcube for some reason or another. Nextcloud Mail isn't bad either. And we also have SoGo mail. It's easy to use any of them. Or just use a Desktop app like Thunderbird.
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It is a bit surprising that noone decided to duplicate the earlier generattion UX of GMail or YMail and make it a web/desktop app for POP/IMAP. The constant upgrade drift into brutalist or minimalist UI is tiresome.
Y! has severely gone downhill, and many Virgo types want to organize where every email belongs and aren't fond of labels from G!
What's one to do once those options are no longer options?
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My 2 cents on the discussion about self-hosted email servers: In the early days, everyone had their own mail server because we could and it was the only way to communicate with the world via email. With the advent of capitalism and wider use of the internet, some companies have moved into this “niche”.
I borrow a saying from sport and apply it to open source:
“Created by the poor, stolen by the rich.” -> “Created by open source, stolen by closed source”Don't be afraid of self-hosting email. We need to take steps to get freedom back.
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To give some context: If you run your own mail server, you have the ability to view and analyse log files.
As far as I know, with a SaaS mail server you can't see delivery or bounce messages from sources.
You have no idea if a sender mail server is on a whitelist, even though the server is on a spam list - only because of “backroom conversations” between an inner circle.
I was told by a customer that he had no chance to deliver mails to a large service provider because his sender IP was on a spam filter list. It took almost 10 days to get the IP off the list.
2 weeks later, the customer told us: we are not receiving any mails from the service provider. Because we use the same spam filter lists, the mails were rejected because the service provider's mail server was on the spam filter list.
Because the service provider didn't care, we had to lower our shield to receive emails from them.
It's unfair just because of the flies and shit.
Some are equal some are more equal. -
My 2 cents on the discussion about self-hosted email servers: In the early days, everyone had their own mail server because we could and it was the only way to communicate with the world via email. With the advent of capitalism and wider use of the internet, some companies have moved into this “niche”.
I borrow a saying from sport and apply it to open source:
“Created by the poor, stolen by the rich.” -> “Created by open source, stolen by closed source”Don't be afraid of self-hosting email. We need to take steps to get freedom back.
@luckow said in /r/selfhosted are not big Cloudron fans:
Don't be afraid of self-hosting email. We need to take steps to get freedom back.
To that notion, IRC did not used to be fashionable in Corp land until someone reinvented it with Slack.
Don't be afraid of creating something new that eclipses IRC, Email and all else, like Signal.org and ConfidantMail.org did. Now with the benefit of code assisting LLMs.
It's May of 2025, Microsoft is shutting down Skype and we don't have a default way of sending files (or making calls) to each other from our devices that is effortless. We have to rely on 3rd party Apps that get so complex your Mom can't use it and it's easier to just think of FTP or Email.
It's time to bring back delight to computing and the internet, not control and restrictions.
Isn't that why we're on Cloudron.io ?
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For me, there's a big difference between self-hosting non-critical apps and self-hosting email — which is a core pillar of my online identity. Email impacts security, reputation, privacy, and productivity.
If I choose to self-host it, I want full control without spending hours checking logs to make sure I'm not being hacked or silently blacklisted. I don’t want to build half a dozen tools just to compensate for the lack of UX or decent API. I also don’t want to waste time writing migration scripts and gluing things together.
Spinning up an email server and connecting a webmail client is one thing. Keeping it secure, private, and user-friendly long-term — that’s the real challenge for me.
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For me, there's a big difference between self-hosting non-critical apps and self-hosting email — which is a core pillar of my online identity. Email impacts security, reputation, privacy, and productivity.
If I choose to self-host it, I want full control without spending hours checking logs to make sure I'm not being hacked or silently blacklisted. I don’t want to build half a dozen tools just to compensate for the lack of UX or decent API. I also don’t want to waste time writing migration scripts and gluing things together.
Spinning up an email server and connecting a webmail client is one thing. Keeping it secure, private, and user-friendly long-term — that’s the real challenge for me.
@SansGuidon said in /r/selfhosted are not big Cloudron fans:
Keeping it secure, private, and user-friendly long-term — that’s the real challenge for me.
Cloudron does it all for you. Well, at least well enough for many of us here.
But if you want to outsource it someone else, fair enough.
To be honest it took me a while to make the leap too, but I'm glad I eventually did, even though I've had the odd deliverability to M$ issue due to their shitty systems.
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@SansGuidon said in /r/selfhosted are not big Cloudron fans:
Keeping it secure, private, and user-friendly long-term — that’s the real challenge for me.
Cloudron does it all for you. Well, at least well enough for many of us here.
But if you want to outsource it someone else, fair enough.
To be honest it took me a while to make the leap too, but I'm glad I eventually did, even though I've had the odd deliverability to M$ issue due to their shitty systems.
@jdaviescoates Yup, had Cloudron email running for years now.
Only recent issue was the missing IP6 PTR record that I didn't see a notification for needing to add.
Otherwise, been reliable all these years, and much happier to have my email (well my end at least) safe from AI being trained on it.
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What web UI do you use to configure aliases, rules etc? I want to give a try but I want to make sure there exist sort of possible 1:1 migration from my settings to cloudron+web UI
@SansGuidon you can always check out the demo:
https://my.demo.cloudron.io/
Login is usernamecloudronand passwordcloudronIf you maybe need a partner for such migrations, happy to help.
I've migrated 300+ User mail setups to Cloudron with inboxes and everything.Like my work? Consider donating a drink. Cheers!
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@SansGuidon you can always check out the demo:
https://my.demo.cloudron.io/
Login is usernamecloudronand passwordcloudronIf you maybe need a partner for such migrations, happy to help.
I've migrated 300+ User mail setups to Cloudron with inboxes and everything.@BrutalBirdie thanks!
I believe then it's the same Web UI I experimented with Hostinger. Not the most awesome UX for my taste unfortunately. Did you migrate also calendar, rules, labels etc?
