this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2025
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34
On email privacy: can I store my own email and relay them through an email provider? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 21 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

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 21 hours ago (12 children)

Only thing I can comment on is that 99% of all E-Mails you will get are unencrypted and can be read by your relay. (There are few e2e encrypted emails being send.)

So either trust them or don't use a relay.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 20 hours ago (2 children)

This 100%. It is well-advised to consider what your security/privacy objectives are, since encryption-at-rest is different than guarding against eavesdropping when sending outbound mail. What threat model you use will define what is or isn't acceptable.

[–] [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

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