POP needs to die a painful death, in the year 2026 when you have multiple devices POP is not the answer, IMAP is the way. Sure you can self host your own email, but you will either need a static IP at home or a VPS with a static IP, than you need to make sure either one is cool with you hosting your email through there. You will need more than a week to figure things out and by the end of the week you will have pulled out all of your hair, I stopped trying going into a few days!

My suggestion however is to get someone else to host your email, the company that hosts my domain name and my VPS also hosts my email. I think I got 4 addresses with them but they have a wildcard option so that I can have infinite email address; so I can block things if they get spammy, I no longer want to see them, I no longer use their services, or I want a longer free trial which I may have done 2 or 3 times.

Just recently, someone wrote about https://github.com/stalwartlabs/stalwart here. It is literally an all-in-one server, so it’s quite hard to mess up.

Email itself is an unreliable delivery method, so usually, if a server cannot send an email to the recipient’s server, it puts it in a queue and tries again after some time. Therefore, a few hours of downtime won’t affect you much. Especially if you don’t need an archive of your correspondence.

So I still recommend trying to run your own full server with stalwart. At most, a couple of days of problems, and then it will work for years.

POP isn’t sync; pop downloads all the messages locally and you tell the server what to do with them once they’re downloaded.

The result is that you have your messages on your device. But when you go to another device, it’s a different set of messages with different read status.

Unless something has changed, that’s how it worked last time I used POP and that’s why everyone used IMAP now that there’s multiple devices (phones, laptops) in play.

You’re right about self hosting email; it’s a pain.

Yes, but IMAP is more common. I’ve been using Maddy for years, and it’s a fairly low-effort solution.

The fussy part in the modern era is DNS setup to ensure other providers accept mail from you, but that’s a one-time step.

POP and IMAP are still alive.

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!

You can use imapsync to keep a local synced copy your email in maildir format. That, along with a domain you own, solves the “I own my own email sycned to my server” problem pretty much completely. Switching email providers is just syncing to the new server (which imapsync supports) and updating your MX records on your domain.

Some email clients (like aerc) can just operate on the maildir directly. That’s what I do, but there are lots of ways to do this.

One option is to just keep using your email client the way you are now talking directly to your mailserver, and just rely on the imapsync side to be your owned backup/migration path.

Alternatively you can run your own local IMAP or POP server like Dovecot backed by the local maildir. So that’s imapsync -> dovecot -> thunderbird (or similar). It’s a little more software to set up, but once it’s set up it should be very reliable and gives you total control over what email client you use and full ownership of your data.

It depends what you mean by sync. There are plenty of services that will host your email server and you just connect via IMAP from all the clients.

But if you mean sync to an archive, look into openarchiver.

Is there a set up where some remote service handles email exchange, and you just sync with it eg through POP style interfaces?

Yup, that’s signing up for a email provider. I wouldn’t call that self hosting since you’re just referring to email client software on your end to store the emails that are being synchronized at the email provider’s hosted server(s).

IMAP is sync so that might be what you meant. POP is even older but that’s for downloading only. And SMTP is for sending.

Those all still exist, most paid email providers still offer them just make sure to check before signing up. It’s harder to find that with free email providers, they usually disable IMAP/POP/SMTP on free accounts.

You can have a hosted e-mail system with your own domain, many service providers will do this. They would have the storage, archive, etc. on their servers. Access would be a web client, e-mail client of your choice, or a bridge demon. Option 2 is a hosted vertual server, so your self hosting but renting a VM server on a providers data center, they take care of the hardware, power, backup (sometimes depending on service), etc. You would set up your OS and e-mail services.

I use a combo of this, I have a service with my own domain and point my MX records there, I use a bridge and a sctipt to pull backups and store them locally but use their email clients for mobile and Thunderbird on PCs.

Edit: FWIW I’ve been using Proton (paid version) for this but will be moving to hosted virtual server at some point, when I get a minute to migrate. I expect the cost to be about the same