this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2025
34 points (97.2% liked)

Selfhosted

45416 readers
303 users here now

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.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
34
On email privacy: can I store my own email and relay them through an email provider? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 20 hours ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
20 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

This is coming from a general perspective of wanting more privacy and seeing news of Mozilla creating an email service "which will definitely not train AI on your email". Sure Mozilla, whatever you say.

Rant aside, here's my question: is it possible to store all of your email on your own infrastructure (VPS or even NAS at home) and simply using an encrypted relay to send emails out to the public internet? My idea is that this removes the problems of keeping your IP whitelisted from the consumer, but the email provider doesn't actually hold your emails. This means your emails remain completely in your control, but you don't have to worry about not being able to send emails to other people as long as your storage backend is alive.

I don't know much about email to comment on what this would take. I think something similar is already possible with an SMTP relay from most email providers, but the problem is that my email also resides on their servers. I don't like that. I want my email to live on my servers alone.

Do you think this is possible? Does any company already do this?

Thanks

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 5 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

Yep.

Rather than try to single-handedly re-engineer an old protocol to be secure, I just use it for stuff where security isn't a big deal. Including messages with links to secure resources (and send credentials via a separate system).

[–] [email protected] 4 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago)

Agreed. Email has its uses -- ubiquity, mostly "Just Works" (tm), most people know how to use it -- and while I might send a symmetric encrypted PDF along with a plaintext email, I'm more inclined to suggest that my recipients adopt Signal and get all the benefits of e2ee. EFF even has a guide for it: https://ssd.eff.org/module/how-to-use-signal