And who’s to blame for that? If I was allowed to serve my own email server I would. Gmail just gives email out for “free” to basically electronically kidnap your data.
Hey! I want my data in my own server that I can easily access from anywhere… I can do that with Lemmy, with music, with images. But e-mail somehow nope.
It would be easy if I could download the data… Hey you can! Here’s a 4 day download for 2 gigs of data! In a random ass format all twisted and crumbled so you can’t do much with it!
Ok, I’m a technical guy but can I not pay you and keep using my gmail account fucking name? Nope sorry gmail owns that. It’s like some asshole wants 50 cents every time you go check your mailbox because maybe he installed the mailbox. Okay, get that fucking box out of my property then! No! You can’t! It’s part of the house! And oh by the way everyone who needs to get in touch with you officially has to use this box.
Ok I’ll get a proton account… But it’s a different asshole who will one day have much more data on me and wants his 50 cents every time I need to use it. And it’s not my account, it’s my account @ SomeAssholes’ box. Com. That’s the part that irks me.
Here’s a bunch of text I’m posting on someone else’s website. Fuck me! I want control of my own shit but it’s always frowned upon to setup your own this or that. Sure you can do email but what if power goes out?
Can’t there be a happy medium… myaccount@myownFQN.com that I serve at my place but I can shop around for a storefront who will be there getting my mail in case the power goes out. I’m sure there is.
But regardless, I’m frustrated. How do you think my mom, a non tecky person who is in her 70’s feels? Will she be able to escape Google? Nope.
Fuck Google! Fucking assholes! You fucked up email for everyone.
If you’re a technical guy you’d know it’s very much possible to host your own email servers. I’ve personally done it for about 25 years now. You just need a reputable smtp service and even gmail gives that away for reasonably free.
I’m trying yet another thing :
So email will go there, then get deleted from my gmail manually.
I hit 100% recently and got a message that I won’t be receiving new mails. I tried to figure out how to delete emails en mass since there is nothing save-worthy, but didn’t see that option anywhere. I ended up creating a script that goes thru every page, deleting 30 or so mails at a time. Ended up running for few hours, but I managed to clean up my Gmail.
This is exactly the kind of shit they do. Grandma is never going to be writing scripts to do that. Instead she’ll be trapped.
Step 1: Get your own domain and use that for mails either with Google or some other service. When you’ve promoted that new address everywhere you will at least be able to switch services (or even host your own) more easily.
The trick is that all google services share the same 15GB free tier. So if you start using Google photos and upload 10GB pictures, you only have a total of 5GB left for emails.
And if you get a new account, your phone is set to steal your images by default. So you end up with the same percentage no. Matter how many accounts you create. For that, there’s Immich.
70% full doesn’t sound like “almost full” to me: that’s about 4.5/15 GB free
I know you asked for selfhost, it just didn’t seem worth it to me when I looked into it. I switched to migadu for hosting my email service. didn’t want to run my own server but now with this setup I can go anywhere and keep the same email at any time.
There are plenty of alternatives. I liked being limited by emails sent/received instead of domains and email Addresses.
Works well for me, 5 months into this setup.
I have been a fastmail customer for many years now (originally a pobox customer) and their email service is really nice. Easy to bring your own domain: set a couple of MX records and you’re good to go.
Start paying for your internet services so that incentives align properly. Pay for search. Pay for email. They aren’t that expensive and you get to escape google’s bullshit.
Remember when Gmail had growing storage? Never made it past 2%.
You can use pop3 or IMAP to access your gmail and keep your emails in your local client instead of on gmail servers.
I love that I’m at about the same place as you and they make it seem like a dire situation but it takes like a year to move it a few % and I just delete a bunch of pictures and more it back 10%
Fuck you google, you farm my data, I’m not paying you shit
fill it up, get a new email and setup redirect. when that’s full, do it again… and again… give the data lol never a dollar
I hosted my own mailserver for many years. The biggest problem was dealing with spam. There was so much and no open-source tool really solved it. Eventually I gave up and switched everything to a fastmail account.
Use aliases and retire them when they’re “leaked”.
I’ve still got an active Gmail account and I don’t fully trust it with spam either. You’ve always got to check.
Weird. Spam was never that much of an issue for me with spamassassin. My problem was that after an update postfix failed to start, but dovecot kept working so I couldn’t receive any email for a week without me noticing, soon after that I gave up.
dovecot/postfix? virtualmin user?
Remember from the donkey’s point of view the only thing that is happening is that a carrot is magically dangling in front of it.
100% agree.
Open archiver let’s you download everything offline pretty easily. Set it up as an imap client. UI has pretty good search.
I spent a few hours this weekend looking at that one and there’s another such project… Mail archiver. I think I do like openarchiver better.
Read a lot of mail probs in the past, I just owe a vps for a few bugs, not because I can’t host at home, it’s for the static ipv4. Install stalwart on it, config SPF, DMARC, DKIM etc, to my Domain provider, well documented after setting up my domain. After a week or two, there are no mails send to spam by others.
There’s fetchmail and some other options to move mail from one IMAP sever to another. This can be used to sort of hybrid self host. Gmail would receive your inbound mail, but it would be moved to your self hosted IMAP server, freeing up space on gmail. You’d point your mail client to your server. You could still use gmail for SMTP.
As far as actually self hosting IMAP, you can have multiple receiving servers set up with different priorities (via DNS MX record). Even with just 1, the normal practice is for a sending mailserver to retry for a few days, so you’re unlikely to lose mail with normal self hosting down time (although I guess this can vary a lot for some).
If you just use Thunderbird to fetch the email using imap there’s no need to have a server except maybe for a backup
Also if you have Thunderbird remove the email from the server then you can’t have 2 email clients with access to all of the emails (phone + laptop for example).