Suggestions for a more privacy conscious email provider

Brad Knowles brad at shub-internet.org
Mon Dec 4 22:47:52 UTC 2017


On Dec 4, 2017, at 4:42 PM, Andy Brezinsky <andy at mbrez.com> wrote:

> If you're really worried about this, separate your mail storage from the mail transport.  Run an inbound and outbound smarthost on your $5 VPS to queue up mail and deliver it back to your house where your long term mail is stored.  This gives you the benefit of the static IP at the VPS along with the security and cheap storage of having the mail storage in house.

The concept is sound, but attempting to use your $5 VPS as your outbound mail relay is only going to end in pain and tears -- your VPS cannot have or build a good enough reputation to get reliable delivery to the big mail providers.  You need to use an outbound mail relay that already has a good reputation, and that works hard to continue to maintain that reputation.

As for handling your inbound mail, use something like imapsync and then effectively treat your IMAP provider as a POP3 provider instead, and download/delete the messages from their system as soon as they have been copied to your local system.

The bad guys could tap into the stream of mail that flows through that system, but they wouldn't be able to get into your archive of old mail without breaking into the box sitting in your house.

--
Brad Knowles <brad at shub-internet.org>

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