Hey everyone,

I know there are a lot of questions about best email providers, but they usually boil down to general questions about privacy and reliability. I have specific questions that I could not find answers to.

I’ve had a Proton Duo plan for my wife and me for about 2 years now. My wife has low tolerance for tech that is not user friendly and works easily. It took a while to migrate all our emails and passwords to Proton and a lot or accounts to passmail aliases, but now we are happy with how the service works.

We both also have our own domains for our main email, and I recently bought another domain to migrate our aliases to. The reason behind this is to ease future migrations if whatever service we use enshitifies. I know that privacy is reduced by using my own domain for aliases, but it’s a consequence I accept to avoid being tied to a single service and to make migration easier in the future.

For that reason, I’ve been burying my head in the sand about what has been happening at Proton. However, with recent news of Proton’s partnership with ETH Zurich and of Proton re-evaluating employee performance based on their AI usage, I can no longer look away.

So here is the ask. I want to migrate to one or more services to specifically replace the functionality I described above. Here are the features that are important to me:

  • Services that support multi-user accounts, where I can be the admin and manage our domains.
  • Ability to assign domains for specific user accounts.
  • Ease of use for users to create aliases on the fly within the password manager.
  • European hosted and privacy focused, with good encryption.
  • Preferably open source clients.

My domains are hosted by Infomaniak, and I’ve considered them, Tuta and Mailbox.org for email providers. Not sure about the best alias generator, but I heard good things about addy.io

I already self-host a lot of services, so for password management, I was thinking about Vaultwarden with an integration to an alias generator. For the few services I host that are accessible outside my network, I use a reverse proxy (NPM), with Authentik for authentication. I am thinking about setting up NetBird as well.

Finally, I am ok paying a reasonable amount for the services.

If I am way off base, I am also happy to hear suggestions about better ways to set things up.

Thanks in advance

  • orcaA
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    9 hours ago

    Some things you might face:

    • Residential IP blocks from your ISP
    • Port 25 is often blocked by ISPs and cloud providers
    • Big email providers immediately distrust small email servers; Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo will silently block and move the emails to junk
    • You have a multitude of DNS records and they have to be perfect. They’re also fiddly. DKIM, DMARC, reverse DNS. One blip and email ain’t working
    • If your security is crap, your server can get turned into a spam cannon and it can take weeks to months to get removed from blacklists
    • Managing your own spam filters sucks
    • Troubleshooting deliverability can be a nightmare