/r/selfhosted are not big Cloudron fans
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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 ānicheā.
I borrow a saying from sport and apply it to open source:
āCreated by the poor, stolen by the rich.ā -> āCreated by open source, stolen by closed sourceāDon'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 ābackroom conversationsā 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 ānicheā.
I borrow a saying from sport and apply it to open source:
āCreated by the poor, stolen by the rich.ā -> āCreated by open source, stolen by closed sourceāDon'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 ā 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 donāt want to build half a dozen tools just to compensate for the lack of UX or decent API. I also donāt 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 ā thatās 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 ā 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 donāt want to build half a dozen tools just to compensate for the lack of UX or decent API. I also donāt 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 ā thatās the real challenge for me.
@SansGuidon said in /r/selfhosted are not big Cloudron fans:
Keeping it secure, private, and user-friendly long-term ā thatās 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 ā thatās 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? -
@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?@SansGuidon Dependent on the source mail server system if it is possible to migrate such things.
Certain providers do not offer this information on a programmatic endpoint.
Thus, my answer, it depends.
If possible to be coded and automated, yes.If 100+ Users calendars, rules need to be migrated by hand
That takes time and money and might be better to be done be the users themselves then.In the case of the 300+ User set up the source mail server did offer everything via. IMAP or other means, thus I could code the whole migration.
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That is what I'm afraid of. Maybe this is something worth working on, in order to be able to offer a similar migration experience as FastMail does here: https://chatgpt.com/c/6819dde7-40a8-8004-8623-a1fa86df1e3b
We can import your mail, contacts, and calendar events from anywhere you can normally log in to with standard IMAP, CardDAV, and CalDAV protocols. This includes Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Outlook.com (mail only).
I mean if I have to convince more folks and lead by example in migrating away from any giant mail provider, I have at least to be convinced myself that I'll save time not waste time. The value of Cloudron for me is that I rather pay with my money than with my time. And the problem with the mail solutions and mail Web UI is that they seem poor in comparison to solutions I already pay for.
I have investigated yesterday for rich web UIs for emails but I couldn't find much. So I believe we are left with very basic UX 2005-2007 style, and manual scripting for migrations. I'm trying to convince more tech and non tech users to adopt Cloudron but I want to show it is possible, like FastMail does, to provide a one click migration operation taking care of everything safely and automatically and convince them of the parity in term of UX/Support/ease of use.
Maybe it can be done with some scripting/integrations efforts, but I have yet to investigate.
