This page has a good overview. Its smaller, it’s faster, it makes more sense to implement, it’s easier to communicate with. POP3 and IMAP are really old. People don’t here much about it because big email providers have no reason to change or improve. For instance, many can’t handle IPV6 still.
It’s basically IMAP but using JSON. That’s the J in JMAP.
One of the reasons I decided to self host email was specifically to use jmap.
https://bulwarkmail.org/ it’s a web mail client that can fully utilize jmap with Stalwart. Its very snappy and the maintainer is very active. They also put together a good android native client and they are working on one for iOS.
Can confirm. Stalwart is really nice. They very recently released their 1.0 version. It was a couple days of issues, then later I broke it again for a few days. Other that that, the server hosting end of it has been very smooth. There is another project that goes well with it called Bulwark. The pair of those have been stable and reliable for me for months now.
The difficulty of self hosting your own email is high, but if you aim to do it, i would recommend Stalwart for self hosting. POP is not what you want as other people are saying. There is also a newer protocal to IMAP called JMAP.
Some things to consider are your inbound and outbound mail paths.
For incoming: Do you have a VPS to be your entry point? Or do you plan to port forward (assuming you even can given the prevalence of CGNAT)? There is also a way to teach a web worker like the kind cloudflare let’s you use for free to break the email down and POST it to a listener in your server across a tunnel and the listener can put it back together into an email at your server and drop it off. That being the only way I have found to get inbound mail behind a double NAT (CGNAT) without a VPS.
For outbound, if you send stuff to major SMTP providers from a residential IP they will block it or mark as spam pretty heavily. You may want to consider a relay to make sure people actually see what you send. Brevo has a free tier, SMTP2Go is solid. There are others as well.
There are other considerations like how will the end user interact with the mail server? I host a Bulwark instance and really love what they are doing with the project, but there are quite a few options for that.
If you end up giving it a go, good luck, and know that it is possible!
Continuwuity is so easy the setup and maintain. If you want to self host a matrix server, I couldn’t recommend this enough.
I think the clients are all better lately. For Android I prefer Schildi Chat Next. For most everything else we use my self hosted Cinny web app. My only iPhone user likes elementX. Fluffy Chat is solid for messaging only, but I did not like that it can’t do the voice and video calls. They may have added that by now, I’m not an expert.
Great stuff! I appreciate you sharing.
I appreciate the refresher. Thanks for sharing the link!
I run a self hosted server for my household and my family gets a lot out of it. I’m not quite sure I’d consider it a gift as much as I do a way to save money and have more privacy and control. To be more blunt, I do not expect my wife would feel happy with me telling her it is a “gift” for her as it is clearly a hobby of mine.
For your question on OS, truenas scale has worked really well for me. If you have comfort running Debian server, that’s a great way to go as well. I think truenas scale would fit you well for one of your specific notes, “Having a simple container interface for future features like homeassistant and jellyfin et al is great too.” I love how easy my containers are to work on and maintain in truenas.
Ultimately, I think you should spin up every OS you are considering and look around first. It would only take a few hours of your time and it’s a very personal choice to a certain degree.
What about graphics card not made by Nvidia? I run local models with AMD chipset and GPU. Works great.
I doubt I’m the only one.
Never heard of it, but it doesn’t look legit.
I recently set up a similar thing for my own kids with cinny using contnuwuity as a backend. It was a little tricky to get it all working, but runs great. My kids can video and voice call me from home and can’t talk to people not on the server. Cinny is only one of many options for the matrix client. I like it because I can make a consistent experience across platforms, but if you are just using Android, SchildiNext is my favorite client that I tested.
Great post! I can definitely feel you on the SMTP settup for it being your first time.
Really cool to read the perspective of someone so new to this that’s informative instead of being for help.
Welcome to the club!
I did a very similar setup very recently. Its not bad. I did try piefed first as some people suggested, but had some issues and it felt like it just wasn’t ready yet. I switched to self hosting lemmy and really like it. I also went with Brevo for email (I started with sendgrid, would not recommend).
Main difference for me is I am using cloudflare (they are my registrar and they allow me to deal with the CGNAT at no extra cost which you don’t have to deal with not to mention a pretty solid WAF for free tier). You may want to implement a WAF of some kind to keep the federation in check. I federate both lemmy and a matrix home server and it doesn’t eat up too much bandwidth.
I also like saving money, so a VPS is something I was trying to avoid. Personally, I don’t think the VPS does a much for securing your home network as people are trying to say here. It is another layer of security, but it’s not a panacea. Not saying I’ll never try it though.
To some degree yes. I ran an experiment to see and found there is just too much of the existing internet infrastructure not implementing IPV6 for this to be reliable. For instance, you can’t use it for email intake because only 2 major players do IPV6.
You still get dynamic assignments from the ISP and have to automate keeping your AAAA records up to date.
The short answer is, it depends. For what OP is doing here, I expect it would work.
If anyone else has messed with this, I’d love to here about it. Might be good as it’s own post.
For those of us behind double NAT (CGNAT) forwarding ports is not an option as we do not control forwarding on the second gateway. This will limit you to any of the solutions that include a device outside your network with a public port that tunnels traffic into your server.
If you don’t mind me asking, which model did you have these issues with? I’m sorry to hear you had a bad experience.
I like your idea, but minisforum has much better platforms for self hosting. The better options do cost twice as much. Not sure they are cost effective as far as purchase price goes.
I run one with an AMD chip set and very much like it. Its fairly low power usage, but I haven’t measured in a while. For what it’s worth, I really like mine.
I don’t find self hosting lemmy to use much of either.
That would depend on your deployment set up. I do not do that, but many people do. I have a very bespoke ingress route that I coded myself. It consists of a serverless cloudflare edge worker to catch emails, break them into a JSON that is sent over a tunnel to cloudflared as a post. This post is directed at containerized python program that rebuilds the email and that container is the only thing with access to deliver mail to the container running stalwart.
The reason I do this is not security though. It was a personal project more or less to see if it could be done and if it was reliable. Particularly to see if i could make a secure delivery method to bypass my ISPs CGNAT without paying for and maintaining a VPS. So far so good. And it has no monthly fee.
Most people I know of (with CGNAT limitations) are just using a cheap VPS with open ports and then the VPS either has the email server there or a tunnel to the SMTP server. If you have a static IP or a DDNS set up where you can properly port forward, that works too.