this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2025
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48
On email privacy: can I store my own email and relay them through an email provider? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 3 weeks ago by marauding_gibberish142@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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This is coming from a general perspective of wanting more privacy and seeing news of Mozilla creating an email service "which will definitely not train AI on your email". Sure Mozilla, whatever you say.

Rant aside, here's my question: is it possible to store all of your email on your own infrastructure (VPS or even NAS at home) and simply using an encrypted relay to send emails out to the public internet? My idea is that this removes the problems of keeping your IP whitelisted from the consumer, but the email provider doesn't actually hold your emails. This means your emails remain completely in your control, but you don't have to worry about not being able to send emails to other people as long as your storage backend is alive.

I don't know much about email to comment on what this would take. I think something similar is already possible with an SMTP relay from most email providers, but the problem is that my email also resides on their servers. I don't like that. I want my email to live on my servers alone.

Do you think this is possible? Does any company already do this?

Thanks

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[–] InnerScientist@lemmy.world 9 points 3 weeks ago (13 children)

Only thing I can comment on is that 99% of all E-Mails you will get are unencrypted and can be read by your relay. (There are few e2e encrypted emails being send.)

So either trust them or don't use a relay.

[–] markstos@lemmy.world -2 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Not true that most incoming email will plaintext. It’s the opposite:

“Most of today’s email services, including Gmail, employ transport layer security (TLS) to protect emails in transit”

Ref: https://umatechnology.org/gmails-new-encryption-can-make-email-safer-heres-why-you-should-use-it/

[–] InnerScientist@lemmy.world 5 points 3 weeks ago

The emails are unencrypted, emails in transit are in transit between the e-mail servers and relays and use secure tls channels.
They are only encrypted from your phone/notebook/browser to the server, then when send they will be encrypted till the next server.

Every server/relay first decrypts everything send to it, because it has to due to the TLS terminating at each server.

See also your source:

Transport Encryption: This form of encryption is used to secure your emails while they are transmitted over the internet. Most of today’s email services, including Gmail, employ transport layer security (TLS) to protect emails in transit. While it encrypts emails between servers, it doesn’t protect the content once it reaches the recipient’s inbox.^1^

In practical terms, Your e-mail server, your e-mail servers relay (if it has any) and your recipients relay server/server can all read your email unless

End-to-End Encryption (E2EE): E2EE takes encryption a step further. It ensures that only the sender and the recipient can decrypt and read the emails. Even the email service provider cannot access the contents of the email. E2EE is typically achieved through third-party encryption tools or services.^1^

Which takes active effort from both the sender and the recipient to make work - it's almost only possible with people you know and little else.

^1^ https://umatechnology.org/gmails-new-encryption-can-make-email-safer-heres-why-you-should-use-it/

[–] suzune@ani.social 2 points 3 weeks ago

TLS is a transport encryption. PGP is content encryption. The latter one is what is most important, even if almost no one uses it.

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