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A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Lots of people have said worthwhile things. Don't selfhost email for example. While going with an email hoster has been recommended a couple times, which is good and easy, I want to offer an alternative: SimpleLogin (or comparable providers). Essentially a "email alias generator", it forwards received emails to one or more mail addresses (Google, Hotmail, what have you). It also allows you to connect a domain and then create new inboxes on the fly by simply sending (or telling a service to send) an email to that non-existing inbox. Which is incredibly handy if you're faced with a situation that demands an email, where you don't want to give out an actual email.
So say you have the domain doe.com, and you're in a physical shop at the register, faced with the question if you want to get 10% off by registering for their members club. You can simply give the cashier the email "coupon_walmart@doe.com" (which does not yet exist), the email will be sent, received bei SL, the inbox created and the coupon code forwarded to your Gmail account. Afterwards, you can disable or delete the inbox and never have to worry about newsletters or data breaches. Nifty!
Every one of these boxes also has its own "sent from" address visible in your actual mail account. Which means that you can simply respond to incoming emails, and the recipient will see the mail address they sent a message to. This also means that you can set up filters in your mail account to move messages from certain sender addresses into specific labels, as if they were real separate email accounts.
Very interesting. How long have you used this? Has it been reliable the whole time?
Please keep in mind that the alias functionality offered by services like SimpleLogin should be included with any paid email service. So SimpleLogin only makes sense if you're using a free email service (like Gmail) and using the free SL aliases based on their domains; bearing in mind those free tiers will usually be severely limited.
If you intend to get your own domain you might as well use a real mail provider.
Yep, I use Fastmail and it has this well integrated within the service as “Masked Emails”
I've been using it for around 1.5 years, and so far I've received every message I've wanted to receive. Though I am always sort of aware that they are yet another party I depend on with my mail delivery, so I don't usually use them for crucial services.
So people must also acknowledge and agree that the solution can read their messages. I guess your use case is junk mail. If OP is looking for an external email for regular use, this might not be a good solution?
Email encryption, as far as I know, is to this day rarely implemented. So your host as well as any entity in between participants will be able to read your messages. SimpleLogin is also provided by Proton if that means anything to you.
Nice. Yeah, keeping in mind Google/Microsoft have their algorithm/ad stuff going through your messages, we usually just count on them not committing fraud directly against us :)
I find there is less management overhead regarding inboxes with SL, compared to creating, managing and logging into multiple receiving addresses under a real mail server.
Sure, you can set one mail account on your domain and define it as catch all, but then won't be able to send from these names.
Or you can create accounts you want, but then cannot quickly create new inboxes without opening your control dashboard.
Obviously, if you want to register with a service anonymously, you'd use one of the SL domains, which I do plenty too!
And at the end of the chain, all messages run into the same singular Google inbox, making it easier for me to manage all messages from all domains.
I'm sure paid email hosters will have their own advantages, but as I said at the beginning of my original comment, I want to show an alternative solution, not a better solution.
There are mail providers that let you use anything as a "from" address as long as it's
@yourdomain. I mean why shouldn't they, it's your domain; it's a silly restriction in the first place. On Migadu it's called "wildcard sender" and once you activate it for a mailbox its user can send asanything@that.domain(even if it doesn't exist; they warn you to set up an alias or catch-all for it but let you shoot yourself in the foot).Migadu also lets you define wildcard aliases (like
shopping.at.*@your.domain) which are a good balance of both worlds: it's not a full catch-all but also you can make them up on the fly without having to go into your settings every time.