Email Servers

[Marzipan]

what's the best / easiest / affordable way to create an email server? going through Zolo or is there a better way? I'm tired of making web mail accounts and forgetting passwords and stuff. be nice if I can use the Windows Mail client and just have everything go there.

recommendations?

 

[JD]

Depends what your goal is? Not sure what Zolo is (maybe you mean Zoho?) but you're still going to have a password that you need to remember. Zoho (if that's what you meant) is really just a webmail provider too with the added benefit that you can tie your own domain name to it for free (limited mailboxes and size though).

Gmail/Outlook/etc all support POP3 and IMAP, so you can use them with any client you want too. I never log into my Live/Hotmail/Outlook accounts on the web as they are just sync in the Windows app, but they still all have passwords.

If you're looking to be rid of passwords, I would think maybe you could setup your own mail server on a VPS provider, and potentially use certificates to authenticate yourself rather than username/password.

 

[Marzipan]

mmm...yes, I see that my request does need clarification. firstly, I did mean Zoho, hehe.

and yes, passwords will still be required...I guess I was speaking more about it being simpler to create / manage multiple email accounts for my use across the different websites I use. I mentioned Windows Email client as an example of what I would use...knowing, but unsaid, that it would submit pw and all the other bits, etc.

 

[Entz]

Most of the shared hosting providers that give you email address will do that. Are you looking mostly for forwarding accounts? That way you don't need to remember username/passwords for them and it all gets funneled into a main one. Creating a bunch of new accounts isn't really going to help the password thing (a password manager would )

Your own email server is a horrible thing to do right, secure, and not be flagged as spam by everything.

 

[Marzipan]

Most of the shared hosting providers that give you email address will do that. Are you looking mostly for forwarding accounts? That way you don't need to remember username/passwords for them and it all gets funneled into a main one. Creating a bunch of new accounts isn't really going to help the password thing (a password manager would )

Your own email server is a horrible thing to do right, secure, and not be flagged as spam by everything.

well then...I guess web mail it is and use a client.

do any web mail work better with an email app than others?

 

[Entz]

As long as it supports pop3 or imap you should be good to go. It’s all standardized

 

[JD]

create / manage multiple email accounts for my use across the different websites I use

Gmail is probably the easiest for that. Say your email is mrf@gmail.com, you can do mrf+hwc@gmail.com to register here, mrf+ms@gmail.com to register on say Microsoft, etc. Basically the + symbol and anything after it is ignored. Same goes for adding periods anywhere in the address too. Then you can setup whatever rules/filters you want based on incoming emails to that address, or see who's leaked your data.

Even with Zoho, you'd have to purposefully create "accounts" each time within the admin portal.

 

[Marzipan]

that bears a question about aliases I've always wondered. if someone emailed friendly@???.com and it was an alias of myname@???.com, when I replied, would it come from my alias or the parent email?

 

[Izerous]

It will vary on the email client. But I have more than a dozen aliases and when I respond I can choose which one to respond as but by default it just selects my primary.

We have been slowly shifting to Zoho to cut down on how much stuff we are hosting locally and how much hardware we need to manage and keep running right now.

Also hipchat was shutdown and slacks pricing is outrageous. Cliq (Zoho) is quite a bit cheaper.

 

[JD]

that bears a question about aliases I've always wondered. if someone emailed friendly@???.com and it was an alias of myname@???.com, when I replied, would it come from my alias or the parent email?

Gmail can do that too: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/22370?hl=en. When I send/reply to emails, there's a dropdown that let's me pick what email it will send from. Defaults to replying from the same address the email was sent to.