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Is POP email still a thing?
(lemmy.zip)
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this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2026
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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!