This is hacker news, we're all either founders who have 2 billion dollars in (illiquid) stock options, or FAANG employees making 600k/year, what else are we going to do if we want email?

Sure, you could pay fastmail $40/year for this, but that's not really the hacker news spirit, and no one on this site knows how to count as low as $40.

The real justifications you can give yourself:

Shared VPS hosting pretty much all bans email, AWS, DO, etc all have ToS that say "no email" as anti-spam measures.

Shared IP space will go straight to spam due to people having spammed on it in the past. Buy a /24 to ensure you don't go straight to spam.

Rackspace ensures you actually own your email, at least moreso than with other shared hosting, and owning your email is important.

been using racknerd.com vps for last 3 years for running miab. ZERO problems so far.

costs around $12/year+domain

> Shared VPS hosting pretty much all bans email, AWS, DO, etc all have ToS that say "no email" as anti-spam measures.

Complete FUD.

Here is DO's acceptable use policy:

https://www.digitalocean.com/legal/acceptable-use-policy

You can see that they explicitly have policies for email hosts.

Here is a guide they host on how to setup a mail server:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-run-...

They forbid spamming, not all mail.

> Shared IP space will go straight to spam due to people having spammed on it in the past. Buy a /24 to ensure you don't go straight to spam.

I have had no problems with deliverability to Google from an IP on a shared block. I don't send marketing mails or any other kind of spam though. Microsoft blocks my IP but they are too small (outside businesses) for me to care to give them special snowflake treatment.

Deliverability of your own mails is also irrelevant for the original discussion about using unique email addresses for signing up to services - you don't need to be able to send at all for that.

For the “least painful” self-hosted email setup, you can’t be hosting on an IP in a subnet that’s ever sent spam, if you want to avoid being blackholed occasionally. This means you can’t have an IP allocated to you by a hosting provider, or a residential ISP, or a “business” ISP, or any cloud provider. That leaves very few options.

Note that I am speaking from personal experience here. I have been self-hosting email for over a decade, from the same IP, with (roughly) the same DNS records. Occasionally, for no reason, I will end up on the global spam list for Gmail, Outlook, or iCloud - never more than one at the same time, and never with a discernible reason. The best I can figure is that the IP is allocated to me by a hosting provider that occasionally sends out spam from its subnet (aka any hosting provider that doesn’t block smtp). I have also tried self-hosting a different mail server from a variety of residential IPs in different cities and countries, and ran into the same problem.

It’s a joke ! You can run an email server off your phone

Not sure if mobile carriers would allow the required ports to be routed, and the connection is usually behind CGNAT, so you can't accept connections from the outside to receive emails. Many home ISPs however can give you a (mostly) unfiltered public IP that once paired with a dynamic DNS service can be reached from the outside. Once the network part is solved, a small cheap box (*Pi like board, mini PC, etc) can be set up to act as mail server, with firewall rules on the router that don't expose anything else to the outside.

I meant just in terms of compute power. Like my isp gives me a static IP with forward and reverse dns, and the box lets me put the phone WiFi ip address in the DMZ so all traffic is handled by the phone. Then the termux app lets me run sshd and other stuff.

And actually I think this is a kind of setup people could get into: an Android dist that focuses on self hosting off an older device.

Satire