This Microsoft outage being the last drop in the bucket, I’m looking to get my email/calendar/contacts somewhere under my control.
As I already self-host a number of things (e.g. my Linux ISO collection), and have services exposed to the internet, it would make sense to run it at home.
After all, it’s not heavy lifting. It’s not hosting 500+ mailboxes for 100+ people. It’s just little old me, with a handful of domains, catch-all receiving and a few dedicated sending addresses.
However email is a bit more mission critical than my smarthome control or self hosted LLMs. Downtime could be critically bad, and I still don’t trust my home setup to be truly 99.999999% available.
I don’t mind paying for a service but if I do I’d prefer something European, given I’m based in the UK (and otherwise am an EU citizen).
I’m really curious how y’all solve it. I guess I’m interested in some kind of hybrid solution where there’s my own server and a hosted service, latter which acts as a backup solution, but still fully synced, so if my internet or power goes out (or my server goes down), I can still get mail sent and delivered.
So I’m not only just interested in the stack you run for email but the entire infrastructure, especially if you’ve solved this sort of off-site fallback service.


This is really useful and I do this too with the service / product name as the “name” (ie
microsoft-mail@mydomain.tla)It’s interesting to see how emails are sold / transferred over time…
I have a formula (service name)-(local slang)(three random numbers)@mydomain.ca that way I can use free trials if I still need the service (I have only done this 2 or 3 times, not saying that I wont do it again but hey when in Rome) it also allows me to have multiple accounts with the same service for different purposes.
If I use a service than stop, forget about it. The email is almost definitely going to be sold so when I get spam I will close the address, if I stumble upon the service again and think oh cool I should try this vaultwarden via bitwarden may say here are your sign in credentials I will try signing in and it will tell me this account is no longer active so I need to create a new one.
My orignal plan was (service name)@mydomain.ca but than I came across the wanting extended free trial so I thought (service name)2@mydomain.ca, some are fine with that some are not. I like throwing in the fluf just to keep bots off of my trails.