I bought a domain name and got a web host. I set the index page to be blank and only use the web host for email. It works well. I still have gmail but try to move everything to my own domain email.
this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2025
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You can point your domain on any hoster like mailbox.org. There are a lot of benefits at not hosting your own mailserver.
A major downside is that email is not encrypted and Email usually contains very sensitive personal information.
I have my own domain and pay for Zoho to host my email. It works well aside from the occasional site that refuses to accept my email as valid because it's not a .com/org domain.
I've been using my own cloud-hosted SMTP relay and Zimbra server for over a decade now, and I love it.
There can be a bit of a learning curve, and in some cases sites won't accept mail from cloud-hosted domains. I add those domains to a rule in sendmail that sends those domains through Amazon SES, and then they get accepted.
If you do go this route, just make sure that your recovery emails or 2FA for things like your registrar go somewhere else. If your cloud provider pulls the plug on you or something you don't want to be stuck waiting for an email that can't arrive.
I love the level of control that I have over my email and wouldn't have it any other way.
tl;dr: steep learning curve, but worth it in the long run. Keep gmail as a recovery/2FA account or something, though.
I've done this for years.
One of the benefits is that you can always just set up Gmail to pull from Pop and send with SMTP anytime if you're not ready to give up Gmail yet and then just turn it off when you are without the need to announce a change in email.
POP…!?
Running a mail infrastructure properly is a complex problem. I would not recommend it for most people. There's a reason most companies outsource it these days.
one more reason why self hosted email just isn't competitive with free/cheap cloud email is the client UX. Gmail is very feature rich while your self hosted email will likely run on RoundCube or SquirrelMail which are extremely barebones.