I don't think they're European, but I pay NameCheap for email service. Local clients access via IMAP.

Spam filtering is mostly done via Thunderbird on my laptop.

Calander and contacts I do though Nextcloud.

I use Zoho Mail with my own domain for really important stuff, like invoices and such, and my own Postfix + Dovecot + Roundcube (with multiple domains) for everything non-essential

What all is down from Microslop?

For Calendar/Contacts I use baikal. I thought about hosting my own email because my host really had me over the coals for what I was doing with it, I started researching and thought it could be fun. I bought a throwaway domain and had one of my static IPs setup for the port 25 being opened up I spent a week trying to do things, most of the Lemmy posts I found and most of the personal things like blogs I was looking for said do not self host your own email.

My previous host was HostHero, they did not have a wildcard email function so I needed to buy the unlimited email package because I do not use the same email address or password for anything. My new host, easyDNS, does offer a wildcard option so I can have unlimitted email addresses.

Why do I use a a different email address for everything? I can just close an account once I no longer use the service or once they start getting spammy, I get next to no spam.

I am not a EU citizen, I am Canadian! So when Trump came in and did his whole 51st state BS I jumped on the boycott Amarica train fast so the Apple services I was paying for stopped, one of which was hide my email so I got Proton, I found out the CEO was a simp for Trump so I was going to host my own and as I said I discovered it is not a simple thing even if I was going to do just one email address.

But I strongly do suggest find a host in the EU, that offers a wildcard option. All though it sounds like you have a good handle on things email is something else.

I host a mailcow instance. Had some issues getting the IP address the VPS assigned me removed from some blacklists, and some companies whitelist email domains and only let you get their emails if you use outlook, gmail, etc., but those are few. Unfortunately it's often medical stuff that thinks they're being "secure" by only sending mail to systems that steal your private data for profit, but not much you can do. And that happens with any email software if you use your own domain as your email address.

I repeatedly see people saying "don't host your own mailserver". So what are we supposed to do? Just give up and let megacorps own all of our mail? I get it, it goes to those servers anyways. F-that. I'm not giving up yet another service to them. Personally, I have a VPS with racknerd and use docker mail server. Been using it for a couple years now and no issues so far. Just make sure your DKIM/SPF records are good.

I use Radicale for my calendars and contacts as basically every program, app or device can handle caldav/carddav.

Self-hosting email however is too painful. Not that it isn't easy on principle... but because the basics are simple all the big mail providers have developed a lot of ways to automatically filter out all those quickly put up mail servers mainly used to distribute spam. So having your own mail server while also constantly jumping through all the hoops so your mails are actually received is barely worth it.

Mail is something I don't want to touch. I use mailbox which is hosted in germany for some years now. For calendar & contacts I use the built-in Nextcloud apps, they also work pretty well

I've self-hosted email for over 20 years but I'm now moving to Fastmail for two reasons: (1) succession, I'm the only one in my house that understands how it works, and (2) email is never fully under your control and the large providers may decide to filter/drop email from your domain. But this is self-hosted, and I did enjoy my years doing it, so go for it if you want. I had good luck with OpenBSD/OpenSMTPD/Dovecot stack. Good luck!

Edit: I forgot to mention you can do a hybrid approach; handle receiving yourself and use a service like smtp2go.com to do delivery.

Email/calendar/contacts on EU server: posteo.de

They support IMAP and DAV

Self-hosting email is like making your own butter.

It’s possible, but most people don’t want to take it on themselves.

Calendar and contacts I’d argue are good candidates to self host. If a config is off and you can’t access them for a day or two, does it matter?

But if email is down, you risk missing something important. If you have a trust issue and everything you send is getting flagged as spam? Hard and slow to fix.

If the problem you’re trying to solve is Flaky and Unethical Big Tech, I would look at finding another, smaller provider and paying for it. Rolling it yourself is a great way to learn entirely too much about mail servers and spending way too much of your free time on it.

I host my email, just not at home but on a rented server.

Here I documented it all https://wiki.gardiol.org/4-e-mail-hosting

It works, its been working for decades now. Never had significant issues....

Email is quite resilient. Servers keep trying to send again and again messages for hours before they give up... So a backup server is not even really required.

If incoming emails bounce, normal email servers will see that and retry later. Not that I personally deal with email- I outsource it to Disroot.org :)

I have run my own mail server for 20+ years. I set up everything correctly, including DKIM and DMARC. I have had the same IPs for 10 years. I send <100 emails a month. A few years ago Google started putting most of my emails in spam, and Microsoft started silently deleting them. They will not fix it. I had to start paying for a relay for outgoing messages.

Use migadu.com.

I built a system to solve all that. Completely Foss. I'm self employed and needed it for my work. Davx for carddav, caldav, tasks etc. Email via postfix/dovecot and sogo for web interface and syncing. All working seamlessly for any custom domain. I give these out to my bigger customers usually as a free addon. But it's realiable and safe and hosted in Germany (not at home) with offsite backup in the Netherlands. How much space are you looking for?

My domain's mail is hosted at https://purelymail.com/ $10/year. They seem to run on AWS hardware, so it's not free of US big tech. It's dirt cheap, but I've never had any problems, either receiving or sending. They have very clear instructions for getting your domain's mail set up.

I just pay Hetzner 2.50-ish euros per month for their cheapest mail hosting offer and call it a day. I did self-host mail for quite some time, it was a huge PITA to set up and keep working. Every now and then I even had issues with my mails not being delivered to outlook addresses (f u M$), so I just gave it up and switched to Hetzner. Their cheapest plan even includes one domain, so depending on the domain you choose, it's not even 1€ per month for the actual email hosting

Email's not nearly as hard to host as people make it out to be. It is intimidating, yes, and there are a few very specific gotchas that make it infeasible or impractical from most if not all home internet connections, but if you're willing to outsource just a little bit on that one particular point so that you have a static, commercial-grade IP address somewhere that you can get reverse DNS and open up SMTP ports on, the rest of it is mostly just fighting with your usual, standard self-hosting struggles of getting it configured and working at all, then making sure it's secure and stays secure, and making sure your data is protected. The setup might be slightly more advanced than some other services just due to the number of moving parts, but it's not fundamentally any different than a webserver. There are some other issues that might crop up a little later in the game, managing your mail server's reputation for not sending spam (especially if, at some point, someone DOES get access and starts sending spam, you need to figure out how to recover your reputation). But overall it's manageable, I've been self-hosting my email for like 30 years. It sucks, but it's worth it.

I ended up just paying for a private host. Now's the time of year to find one, with all of the Black Friday/Cyber Monday promotions taking place.

Receiving email isn't too bad. Get a domain, set up dovecot and postfix, maybe a web frontend if you care. They're in basically every distribution's repos. I'm sure there's a mess of containers for it too, if that's your thing. Just have to make sure your ISP doesn't block port 25.

Sending email, however, is a different beast. You need to have a stable, clean, IP address. Then setup all the extra stuff on top (DKIM, SPF, etc.)

Your dynamic IP from your home ISP isn't going to cut it. If you can get a static IP, it might work, otherwise you need a tunnel or to host everything in the cloud, somewhat defeating the point.

Once you have a stable IP, and have the proper DNS records/certs set up, you begin the battle of getting your IP allowlisted. If you're lucky, the IP will be clean-ish and not flagged. If it's flagged, you're basically screwed and need to get another IP. Then you have to test sending email to all the big providers and contact the ones that don't allow your messages through. It's a long process. It's possible, but tedious.

I ran my own mail server for three years. It was fun, but also a lot.

I run Maddy on a VPS. It's pretty much trouble-free.

Not selfhosted but I've been a happy MxRoute user for a few years.

The fallback part is the hardest bit of what you're describing, because true active-active mail is a lot of work for one person. A simpler setup that gets you most of it:

• Run your main mail server at home like you planned, and put a second, identical one on a small cheap VPS as a warm standby. Point a second MX record at the VPS with a lower priority, so when your home server is unreachable, sending servers deliver there instead and the mail just waits for you.
• Sync the mailboxes between the two on a schedule (there are tools that do mailbox-to-mailbox sync over IMAP), or at least keep nightly backups of the mail data on the VPS so you can restore quickly. FYI, the standby doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to hold your mail untill you're back.
• For certs, use DNS-based validation for the mail hostnames so both servers can hold valid certs for the same names without fighting over HTTP validation. That way TLS works whichever box is answering.
• Send outbound through a relay with SPF, DKIM and DMARC set up for your domain, rather than directly from your home IP, which keeps deliverability sane.
• And honestly, keep calendar and contacts on a seperate lightweight server, so a mail outage doesn't take those down too. Mail servers retry delivery for days, so a short home outage rarely loses mail at all. The thing you're really protecting against is a long one, and the standby MX covers that.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

[Thread #167 for this comm, first seen 12th Nov 2026, 22:40] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

TLDR: "How do you self-host email" – that's the thing, I don't. I don't host email sending and receiving myself, just the archive.

Here's a starting point for EU-based providers. If you give more details about your needs (how many mailboxes etc.) we can advise or recommend.

My main criteria is access through regular IMAP/SMTP without any made-up hurdles (cough Proton "email bridge").

Based on your need for email + calendar + contacts I'd say mailbox.org is a likely candidate. Please note that you pay separately for each mailbox (distinct login) but you can establish a "family" relation between accounts for sharing data.

What I do personally:

• Self-host a CalDAV/CardDAV server (Radicale) for calendar/contacts.
• Use a regular email provider (Migadu) with my own custom domains.
• I access the live mailboxes via IMAP from various email clients (desktop, phone etc.)
• Same for sending, use the provider's SMTP.
• I use mbsync aka isync to fetch a copy of all email to my server and delete messages older than 30 days from the live mailboxes.
• I self-host a private IMAP server and webmail mainly for browsing and searching this mail archive. I don't send from this webmail (although I could connect it to the live SMTP if I ever wanted).

If I ever need to switch providers I can do it as fast as I can sign up / pay with someone else and all it takes is updating the IMAP/SMTP server address on the various clients, and the DNS records for my email domains. Nothing else changes about the setup.

Why Migadu: they have a pricing model where you pay for storage and emails sent/received but can otherwise have unlimited domains, aliases, mailboxes, logins etc. It can become price-efficient very rapidly if you use it for 2+ people and/or have multiple email domains because this is exactly where regular providers corner you – they tax per mailbox, per domain, if you want more than a handful of aliases etc.

I solved it with mailcow dockerized and an LT2P service for a non residential static IP. Works great, regular updates & patches and super reliable.

You can set up a fallback using their supplied script to make a cold backup in the cloud if you need to, but I've never had to bother. I also use another of their scripts to properly dump the db and files to my NAS and then I use borg to copy all the things to Hetzner.

You don't want to host your own email.

I use a host and they have an email service. If I complain to them about my emails, their response is "do not use us as your primary source of emails".

If a webhost does not want to be responsible for your emails, you should not be in charge of your own emails.

Do not fully self-host your mail. It'll be constant trouble. Large providers like Google and Microsoft are notorious for blocking them, or never even accepting mail from them in the first place. You can get it unblocked in theory, I hope you like whack-a-mole. Ironically often by eMail.

What you can do is just buy a hosted mailbox (small or no storage), and have a server at home that instantly collected everything (IMAP). It also basically just proxies outgoing mail to them (SMTP). In practice you host and control your mail, without the peering-issues.