I was thinking about how to improve my email situation, because at the moment I am using an address of a commercial mail provider, which obviously brings some concerns of lock-in.
While fully self-hosting the email is an option, I am a bit wary of this, because having a working email is very critical and I do trust the commercial providers to give better uptime and reliability than my old server in the closet. Does anyone have experience hosting an email service and what is it like/could you recommend it?
The other option that I am more inclined to is having the email hosted by some cloud provider, but using an address under my personal domain name. The point would be of course that I could change the email provider while keeping the address. Which providers supporting this could you recommend? What is the process like linking a domain to an email host?
If you decide to run everything yourself, Run Your Own Mail Server by Michael W Lucas is a recent and comprehensive book on the topic.
But for most people in your situation, email aliases (forwarders) for your domain pointed at an email provider is the best option. I’ve used this setup for decades. On top of being able to swap the back end when you want, you can also spin up aliases whenever you want, so you could decide each entity you interact with a different email address. That way if it starts getting spam, you know who betrayed you.
Currently, my top two email provider recommendations are FastMail and Proton.
My web host went from allowing a catch-all, so I could just make up aliases on the fly to making me configure each alias manually. So I also use MXRoute’s forwarding service to enable catch-alls on a couple domains. I used a coupon and paid for like ten years upfront.
Excellent advice on Lucas’s book!
Another email provider that I’ve used for years and have had good experiences with is Zoho.