Setting Up My Own E-Mail Server

[MattF]

Chuff me. Talk about crap timing. Vodafone have decided they're dumping Demon Internet, so my ADSL connection will be gone mid May. No way on earth I'm taking on a new 12 or 18 month fibre contract at this address. Currently run my own e-mail server, webserver etc., so it looks like I'm definitely going to have to sort some e-mail hosting if I want to keep the domains e-mail.

Asked this question a while ago & Google seemed to get a lot of recommendations. Is it their GMail/G Suite thing I'd need to use my own domains? How arsey is it to set up?

 

[eLuSiVeMiTe]

Dunno. I just forward all my domaib bame email addys to the same Gmail address.

 

[MattF]

How do you do that? Tried looking into the setup, and ended up more confused than when I started.

 

[eLuSiVeMiTe]

How do you do that? Tried looking into the setup, and ended up more confused than when I started.

My hosting control panel lets me set them up as either an email or forwarding email and asks where to forward before setting it up.

 

[eLuSiVeMiTe]

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/175365?hl=en

 

[MattF]

My hosting control panel lets me set them up as either an email or forwarding email and asks where to forward before setting it up.

Right. I'll check into that. The setup I currently have with my registrar is just using their Nameservers, with my server IP's being listed for the webserver, MX etc. Don't currently do any of the hosting with the registrar themselves.

 

[eSCHEn]

How much storage space do you utilize currently Matt? I run several domains with email through a shared hosting package for about sixty quid a year. Domain costs are extra of course. For this I get IMAP/POP3 for clients and webmail in the form of roundcube or horde or squirrelmail. The only limit that the hosting really has is a maximum of 5Gb storage space.

 

[MattF]

How much storage space do you utilize currently Matt? I run several domains with email through a shared hosting package for about sixty quid a year. Domain costs are extra of course. For this I get IMAP/POP3 for clients and webmail in the form of roundcube or horde or squirrelmail. The only limit that the hosting really has is a maximum of 5Gb storage space.

Not sure on the storage front. I'll have a quick peek on the server in a bit & see how much space the e-mails are consuming.

My current setup, (domains registered through Namecheap, & web, MX IP's in their DNS control panel all point to my server here), is a Postfix server for the e-mail. If there's some way I can easily punt that to an external service or such, via the DNS, rather than to my server? When I looked at it last, confused the hell out of myself. If I can get e-mail hosting for the 3 domains, which allows multiple addresses for each domain, with IMAP access rather than being forcex to use a web interface, that's basically all I need, I think. Just trying to avoid having to go with a generic e-mail address & having to update all of my profiles/details on various sites.

Hopefully when I get resettled, I'll be able to take over on my own server again.

p.s: Apologies if I'm not on the ball today, btw. I seem to be having a permanent brainfart today.

 

[eSCHEn]

To move hosts you'd ideally own the domains and be able to futter about with the DNS so you're well placed for that

Whilst not a precise analogy, DNS can be thought of as a telephone book. A telephone entry contains the name of the person you want and their phone number. The difference is that in DNS *you* are responsible for your telephone number and name and you also get a lot of fancy telephone numbers not just POTS (think fax, modem, BBS etc).

The registrar (person who leases the domain name to you) usually has a mechanism to update the name server (NS) records for your domain. These effectively say "please go to this place to find the answer to any domain questions". A DNS query (domain question) can be for lots of different things, such as:

A Record - an IPv4 address
AAAA Record - an IPv6 address
MX Record - mail handling information such as what server and what priority
CNAME Record - basically an alias so "matt.example.com" could point to "matt.home.example.com"

You can either add in the MX records directly as you do now or change nameservers and use the new hosts' settings. Typically you'd do the latter as directly setting the MX records is usually only done when you own and operate the servers yourself (as you currently do).

 

[MattH]

I use hosted exchange with Cobweb and my DNS is with 123reg.
3 x 1tb mailboxes cost about £20 per month with 2 domain name spaces.

 

[rikrobson]

Just rent a cheap vps for a few months. I pay less than £5 month to run my vps. If you sign up to amazon Web services. You get a year's free hosting.
You should be able to image your current setup and migrate it to the vps