I’ve been around selfhosting most of my life and have seen a variety of different setups and reasons for selfhosting. For myself, I don’t really self host as mant services for myself as I do infrastructure. I like to build out the things that are usually invisible to people. I host some stuff that’s relatively visible, but most of my time is spent building an over engineered backbone for all the services I could theoretically host. For instance, full domain authentication and oversight with kerberized network storage, and both internal and public DNS.
The actual services I host? Mail and vaultwarden, with a few (i.e. < 3) more to come.
I absolutely do not need the level of infrastructure I need, but I honestly prefer that to the majority of possible things I could host. That’s the fun stuff to me; the meat and potatoes. But I know some people do focus more on the actual useful services they can host, or on achieving specific things with their self hosting. What types of things do you host and why?
Because emails can have a boatload of sensitive information (especially when collected en masse, think years and years of emails)… In the day of AI bullshit. Minimizing all that data being directly attached to an account associated with you and owned by google or some other corp seems like a sane desire. If you primary a gmail account… and they start (they probably already are) training on that dataset. Shit is going to get real testy.
If you email to people on gmail or outlook, won’t Google and Microsoft still end up with copies of most of your mail?
Yes, but at the very least they have to do queries to build that profile out across dozens or hundreds of recipients… And they only get what I explicitly sent to them/their users.
Google collects 100% of the emails you’re getting on gmail and it’s already sent directly to you… so they see it completely… including emails being sent to other sources since it originates from their server (so collecting information that would be going to an MS Exchange server as well…).
Self hosting this means that you’re collecting your own shit… And companies can only get the outgoing side to their users. And never the full picture of your systems/emails.
This matters a lot more than you think. Lots of systems for automation sends through systems like Mailchimp, PHPmailer, etc… So those emails from your doctor likely never originated from MS or Google to begin with. When it hits your inbox on Gmail or Outlook… Well now it’s on their system. Now they can analyze it.
I meant what software stack do you use to host your email.
Btw have you encountered issues with receiving/sending mail through that account, considering the ongoing cartelization?
Mailcow.
Personally. No. The hardest part is getting a clean IP and to setup PTR records for a static IP. The rest has been easy for me personally… but I do this shit for a living so I might be biased.