I have a confession to make. I’m one of those people who use (or at least own) 10+ email addresses. Sure, I don’t really use all of them on a daily basis, but I use quite a few of them frequently. And yet, despite years of accumulated inboxes and thousands of emails spanning more than a decade — none of them were really mine. They lived on someone else’s server, subject to someone else’s pricing decisions, someone else’s product roadmap. That changed recently, at least for some of my email addresses, and I couldn’t be happier about it.
How it started
I started with a Hotmail address back in the days, and I still use that exact account for all my Microsoft things (OneDrive, shared calendar with my wife, Office subscription, etc.). At some point, I needed a Gmail address as well. Because… you know… it’s Google. I don’t like it, but life’s a bit easier with a Google account, I guess.
Years later, I discovered the joy of having my own domain, and with that came the first set of corresponding email addresses as well. This domain’s email addresses are still my default for most of my logins and other things. In particular, the “catch-all” address. In case you’re not familiar with that concept: You can create a single inbox (like “catchall@my-lovely-domain.dev”) and mark it as “catch-all”, and it will receive all emails to any “unknown” email address of your domain. So if you register an account at uberspace.de (what I would highly recommend by the way), you can just use “uberspace@my-lovely-domain.dev” for the registration, and the incoming mails will appear in your “catchall@my-lovely-domain.dev” inbox. That way, you can have a different email address for all your accounts without the need to create individual inboxes for each. And if you receive any spam, just look at the recipient email, and you will see which of your service providers sold your data (or lost it in a data breach).
After that, a couple of other domains came and went, and with them, some short-lived email addresses appeared and disappeared. And finally, a few years ago, I discovered hey.com, and I really like the concept and how the screening and the SPAM filter work out of the box. It’s a great email hoster. For the last few years, this was my go-to email for logins and private email communication.
Time for a change
Remember that domain I bought many years ago, that still powers a lot of my emails? I purchased that as part of a Windows hosting package when I wanted a place for my .NET projects, and back then, .NET was still Windows-only. Alfahosting was one of the few hosters that had affordable Windows hosting packages. Over the years, I kept using those emails, but moved my web hosting around until I settled on Uberspace. But I was still paying for that Windows hosting on Alfahosting. And the only thing I was using was the email service. Really oversized and therefore overpriced if I just use the emails. And when Alfahosting started charging me for extended support for an outdated PHP version I wasn’t even using, I knew it was time to look for a new email hoster.
But where should I go? Sooooo many options! Maybe I should just move everything to hey.com? While I really like the experience in general, there were too many cons on my pros and cons list:
- I would have to pay extra to use my custom domain instead of @hey.com
- IMAP is not supported, which means I’m “stuck” with their client apps (which, again, are pretty good)
- While it’s really not Microsoft, Apple, or Google, it’s still just another US company I’m depending on
That’s why I started researching European mail hosters which would allow me to use my own domain. After some research, I reached out to my personal Oracle of Delphi in the form of a Signal group chat with my closest friends. Most of them are in some kind of technical profession and have valuable insights and sometimes strong opinions when it comes to these kinds of questions. And as usual, they didn’t disappoint at all. Even though I specifically stated “Running my own mail server isn’t really an option”, that’s exactly what they proposed. So here I am, hosting my own emails on my Uberspace server.
The fear of losing all my emails
Every time I thought about moving my emails to another hoster in the past, I somehow assumed that this would mean either losing all my emails in my inboxes or a gigantic migration effort. But both turned out to be wrong. The migration was surprisingly simple and ran pretty fast. And yes, if you think about it, it’s kind of obvious. IMAP makes this easy, but I never really thought it through. (While I’m writing this, I wonder if “I never really thought it through” would be a good title for my memoirs… At least, this sentence feels pretty familiar.)
I own my emails now 🎉
I said it before, and I will say it again: Big, BIG shout out to Uberspace and their documentation (the labs in particular). They have a specific lab about migrating your emails to Uberspace. That documentation has everything I needed to make the transition incredibly painless. Every asteroid (that’s what the servers on Uberspace are called) has the tool imapsync preinstalled, which brings all emails from one IMAP account to another. I took just a couple of minutes to move all my emails since November 2013. The only problem in the entire process was *drum roll* Alfahosting. Again. Part of the migration is setting a certain TXT record for my domain. And for reasons I don’t understand, Alfahosting will not let you write your own TXT records. You have to choose from a bunch of templates that might or might not satisfy your needs. Spoiler: None of the templates worked for this use case. I had to contact the customer service to get what I wanted. But to stop ranting and say something nice: the customer service was friendly and quick. Which is the minimum bar I’d set for a company I’ve been paying for years to host emails I could have hosted myself for free. So… well done, I guess. 🤷
What’s next?
This migration started as a billing annoyance. But somewhere between running imapsync and watching twelve years of emails land safely on my own server, it turned into something else. A small act of reclaiming something I’d quietly outsourced for years.
Contacts and calendars are next. I’ll keep you posted – literally.