My ISP and I are not in the same country. I signed up with them when I lived in the US, but I don’t remember anything about it that would have required that. I made a casual search for ISPs based in Portugal, but didn’t try very hard because it doesn’t really matter to me.
I find the picture “it isn’t a legit mail if it didn’t come from Google” kind of troubling. I hope this applies only to that kind of self-hosting scenario. I bet that could be a rather demanding job for anyone - when I look at the various stuff that rides along in the headers, in email I get, I have no idea what all that stuff is and who cares, and I used to work somewhat in that area at an institution that hosted its own mail.
Sad part one : a lot of smaller mail providers just co-locate their mail hosting inside google, so you end up having to deal with google changes the same way.
Many providers also do not offer pop/smtp email.
Anyway, some good recomendation for a free email provider ? Supporting pop3/smtp, not needing oauth, and working somewhat well ?
Basically anything that isn’t Google or Micro$oft is quite okay to some extend.
I still recommend Disroot,as I’ve already done in another thread: Email | Disroot
It’s more like a community project,they don’t have ads or trackers and don’t work for generating profit (extending the quota still costs something).
Sometimes they close registrations for some time,but it’s really worth waiting for it.
But you also have to be aware to the fact that gmail is the reason why the life is so much harder if you try to self-host your mail. So either way you go gmail / google will make your life harder. There is no good pick.
I never tought i woudl say that but currently i see only one way out: deprecating the email completely and building something new, platform-independent, less propertiary-addons and walled-gardens ridden protocol. Good luck to conceptualize that with forward thinking security and privacy however.
I am aware that the big email providers are why smaller email providers and self-hosters have a difficult time. All that being said, I have recently heard from a couple self-hosted email folks that they haven’t had issues yet with their messages landing in spam folders yet. I may reconsider self-hosting email very soon however I have heard that it is rather difficult, especially up to a standard email providers will accept without question
Yes, and I wouldn’t say it’s all Google’s fault. One of the main uses hackers have for your home PC, is to use it to send spam, so email originating from the user world is viewed with grave suspicion.
Not a free email provider, but I figure that in the long run you’re better off when you pay for a - to me - essential service. I moved from GMail to mailbox.org. Cheapest 1€/month (minus rebate), I went with 3€/month and got some WebDAV accessible cloud storage + online office apps as well.
Works very well in Haiku.
I have the Standard package at fastmail.com, it works ok with Haiku. It is not cheap and in case it is important to you: they have extensively used allegria/memphis illustration style on their webpage previously.
I also use Fastmail. Really easy to setup the IMAP access. They have lot of useful guides and how-to documents about how to configure using different mail clients. Also, the web interface is really nice and clean.
Prxy do personal email for $19.95 per year. They say stuff is hosted on ‘premier public cloud services’. I assume that’s Amazon and Microsoft (and their web access is on something called Zimbra). Not tried it in Haiku yet though.
It’s easy to blame Google but… most of this is not really their fault, and most of their demands are quite reasonable.
Here’s a check of what you need:
You need ot be able to open TCP port 25 on your machine so you can be an SMTP server and send emails. Some ISPs completely block this for their endusers because it is used to send spam by malware otherwise. Some don’t block it, some have an option to block it or not in their web interface or router settings. Google is not involved at all
You need to properly set up DKIM, SPF and a few other things involving DNS. This is to authenticate that your server is associated with a specific domain name, and is the one responsible for sending email for that domain. Otherwise, anyone could pretend to be sending mails from your domain, and impersonate you. I think it is pretty reasonable that Google is requiring this, and rejecting email from servers that don’t have this basic level of authentication
Then, there is the maybe more controversial part, and that’s Google (and other big providers) spam filters. There are two problems with these. On GMail, at least a part of the spam filter is shared between users. This means, if emails from a mailing list are classified as spam by a lot of users, they end up going in the spam folder for everyone. This affects all mailing lists and mails sent to a lot of people. At some point there were problems where the GSoC organizers (using @google.com emails) were ending up in spam because people who didn’t participate in GSoC anymore marked the emails as spam instead of unsubscribing from the list. Another problem is that they use some non-auditable filter (maybe modern “AI” or maybe something like an old style bayesian filter, the idea is the same), where you train it with past email manually classified as spam or not spam, and it can detect if future emails are spam or not. Combined with the previous factor, and with the fact that a lot of gmail emails tend to be non-spam and a lot of spam tends to use some other address, the filter often ends up saying anything with @gmail.com is ok, and anything with some other domain is not.
But, in the end, receiving email on a self hosted system is easy. Sending is a bit more work, but is still doable. And of course you can use one of many services who know how to do it.
For my mail setup That is missing DNSSEC (though implied since you said DKIM.)
Aswell as DANE (to pin your tls cert in dns) and the ability to send and receive tls encrypted mail without startssl (that is seperate port that accepts tls only)
It’s what I remember from my own (incomplete) setup, which works well at least for receiving mails on my self-hosted system. There may be a bit more things to do. Another problem is the lack of any way to talk to a human at Google to help investigate problems. I can understand it for a small self-hoster like me, they may have more important things to do, but it is also the case for larger services. When something doesn’t work, if it isn’t covered by Google documentation, good luck. And they don’t want to provide too much documentation because it would help the spammers workaround their constraints (security by obscurity, in a way?)
The problem with spam filters is not google´s exclusivity. There is the same problem with offline versions in MS Outlook, for example, or dedicated appliances. Basically, most people ( and companies ) do not understand that a spam filter is not 100% trustable and that needs to be monitored.
As an example, we had as a customer a doctor, urologist and sexologist. She had also a blog and would answer people´s questions by email. Guess which were the words mostly present in her emails ? Guess where most of her emails would end up ? And she had a hard time ( not a tech-inclined person ) to understand why. In the end, we had a secretary appointed to organize her messages, and move the good ones from the spam filter to the Inbox. Because she wouldn´t accept to keep the spam filter off.