linode Managed Email Solution.
Just curious if it had bee discussed before, but who else would be interested in a managed Email solution from Linode. I know I could install whatever I wanted in my VPS. But I don't want to manage an email server. Most people/companies don't these days.
While Office 365 and Google workspace are both fine and dandy for business I would love a less expensive option. Now to host my kids email in my vanity domain is going to run $72 per year with Google Canceling the G-Suite Legacy Free accounts.
Microsoft 365 offers up to 6 email addresses with a home subscription but it requires you host your domain with Godaddy for some reason. While not being the optimal solution it is probably the direction I will go baring a better suggestion/option.
3 Replies
You are unlikely to find something like this that's not geared toward business…which means that it's going to have a whole bunch of stuff that you don't need (which you'll have to pay for nevertheless)…mailing lists, ad campaigns, analytics, etc.
Office 365 has it's own set of problems…there are several threads on this forum documenting them.
Shared hosting services usually offer what you're asking for but they have their own set of problems too (outdated software, slavish dependence on cPanel, awful support). IMHO, there are no good shared hosting services…only ones that are less terrible than others.
Running an email service is not hard…just tedious. Most of the tedium comes from being a good netizen and implementing all of the stuff required to do that -- SPF, DKIM, DMARC. The good news is that, once you get the stuff working, you rarely have to mess with it again.
I do exactly what you want to do. Most of my problems come from all the stuff I've bolted on to deal with spam and the like. If you don't want to do any of that, you can just use out-of-box stuff like SpamAssassin, DSpam and ClamAV.
Believe me, I can understand your reluctance to jump into this. Look at it as a learning experience…
-- sw
A couple of years ago I ran my own mail server on a Linode VPS using Mail-In-A-Box .
It worked fine and I didn't find it to be all that much work.
However the cost of running a cheap VPS vs. using a cheap shared host (we like pair.com whom we have hosted with in the past) was about $20 a year difference and they did all the work as well having the staff and the tooling to deal with spam, blacklists, etc.
Also, they had network and application redundancies that I didn't so I gave up the dedicated Linode mail server, paid the extra $20, and put everything on Pair and simply used DNS MX records at my my registry to point mail traffic for the many domains which have email addresses over to the Pair mail server.
YMMV.
