Free your email
Hosting an email server no longer requires blood sacrifices and a resident dark wizard, but there are mages that will do it for a fee.
About a decade ago, Google opened up its hitherto invitation only webmail service to the masses and the masses came in their droves. Seduced by the free 2GB of storage, the clean interface and, most importantly, the fact that it saved your drafts pretty often, so when your connection was interrupted and the page reloaded your polite missive was mostly intact.
This was made possible by some impressive JavaScript voodoo which eventually became the well-known AJAX. Microsoft and Yahoo were forced to up their webmail offerings and soon most everyone was using one of these services for their primary email. The price of this convenience was that one’s search provider was now one’s email provider, and they had no scruples about scouring one’s messages and contacts for clues about what to advertise on one’s search results.
We’ve shied away from covering setting up your own email server guides in the past for a number of reasons. One is that there’s several different components involved and these all deserve quite a lot of words to set up in a sane manner. Another reason is that other email servers can be pretty untrusting and with good reason—there’s a huge number of dodgy email servers running on compromised machines that are spewing spam messages 24/7. To combat this, a server reputation system has been developed, but unfortunately in some situations having no reputation is not much better than having a bad one. Until mail is accepted successfully and received by another server, the sending server’s reputation will not improve. So there is potential for a catch-22 situation. Worse, if your email server is compromised then its IP will very likely be blacklisted for a Very Long Time.
Be that as it may, it almost worked for Hillary Clinton and there are now some great complete email solutions including Mail-in-a-Box, iRedMail and Mailcow ( http://mailcow.email). Mailcow combines Postfix, Dovecot, Spamassassin, ClamAV, OpenDKIM, the rather splendid Roundcube webmail interface, and the database and web server of your choosing, into one easy to install package. It’s all very well running your own email server, but what happens when it breaks? It’s alright if it was just a hobby project – just pick up the pieces and try again with a better backup or security strategy – but for your primary email account why not avoid that burden and use a different email provider?
Protonmail is a privacy conscious email provider incorporated in Switzerland (many of its staff worked at CERN). It offers free and paid-for email services and since August 2015 its entire codebase is open source. Using its webmail interface, emails between Protonmail users are endto-end encrypted – users have two passwords, one for authenticating with the service and a mailbox password which is used to decrypt a private key – so emails sent and stored on the service can’t be accessed by ProtonMail or anyone else. ProtonMail’s web interface can also send asymmetrically encrypted email to outside addresses, directing the recipient to a web page where they must enter a preshared private key (sent from the sender) to view the email. The service doesn’t work with traditional IMAP, SMTP or POP3 clients, but mobile apps and Two Factor Authentication (2FA) are available.
An alternative service is FastMail, and its premium service grants the ability to use your own domain. Data at rest is stored encrypted and tools are available for migrating email from IMAP accounts. Hushmail is also worth investigating as, like Protonmail, it offers a free service with transparent encryption between users, and, like FastMail, its paid-for services can work with your own domain name.