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This is ultimately what I ended up doing, with one caveat: I have mailinabox running on a VPS in a local datacenter.

If my ISP wasn’t so aggressive with sending mail, I would’ve just self hosted on my own computer.

However, mailinabox also comes with nextcloud, and it works out of the box with exchange activesync, allowing me to basically mimic gmail’s syncing of calendar/contacts/etc. I made the switch about a year ago, it took registering two domains (one for the actual mail server and one for <lastname>.com) and paying for the VPS, plus all the overhead of initial configuration, but it has been smooth sailing since. My email is happily firstname@lastname.com to the public and private@mailserver.tld for private stuff- it even supports the firstne+string@lastname.com.

At the end of the day, this is probably the best someone can reasonably do. Then it’s just ddg and Apple Maps.

1 comments

The fact you were able to register your lastname as a dotcom is incredibly fortunate, especially if that was a recent registration. Mine has been a marketing agency since 1995.

I ran my own business email for a while in a DigitalOcean VPS, but it was a huge pain. I did it all by hand though, I should give mailinabox a try.

I've just set up a mail server with the same stack as mailinabox (with a few minor differences, since I didn't care for the web-screens, self-hosted DNS and the fact that my residential ISP offers a static IP service).

If you do give it a try, I would personally simplify the set-up. If you're comfortable with some downtime you can get away with running just Postfix, Dovecot (with some secondary services) and delegating to the OS for user management. All of them come with systemd services so it isn't too bad to manage.

I got lastnamefarm.com there are plenty of variations on that theme to go around. My last name is common enough that if I had thought to get it in 1993 I would have sold it by now anyway.