I decided this past weekend to set up email my on own domain. My previous post detailed why I decided to do this. Now I'll explain how I implented it and why I made some of the choices that I did.
My DNS is registered using Gandi, and they provide quite an excellent email hosting solution for their DNS customers. It was extremely easy to set up, and the details of how can be found here. A brief summary of how it works:
-
You ensure that your MX records direct mail to Gandi's managed mail servers. My domain had the MX records set automatically, but I had to manually implement the SPF record.
-
You purchase some email addresses under your DNS address. Gandi provides two offerings - 3GB of storage, or 50GB of storage.
-
You activate the mailboxes, ie. set the username and password for the purchased account(s).
Here are some of the reasons I like this approach and some of the features I like about this setup:
-
I don't have to manage the mail server myself. This saves me the effort of having to set up a mail transfer agent, IMAP server, web interface, spam filter, and so on.
-
It supports an unlimited number of aliases. This is great for all those web services that require registration so they can send you lots of spam later on. Simply create a new alias and register with that, then if you want to stop receiving their messages, you can delete the alias! And if you want to re-enable it, you can simply add it back, temporarily or permanently.
-
It comes with a built-in webmail interface, but IMAP is trivial to set up as well.
-
It's a small step for freedom from the large internet companies that now serve the majority of email, nay, all of our internet communications.
The major drawback of this setup is that I am still not hosting the mail myself. Doing so would require a lot of independent work, though that's not a drawback in and of itself. However, since incoming mail will always be addressed to the current domain, should I change my mind and self-host at some later date, I can still use the same mail addresses that I set up with the provider's managed solution.
That's it! I was surprised at how easy it was and I'm loving this solution. Hopefully I'll be able to start migrating some of my accounts to use these new addresses.