Might want to check out addy.io. It's a managed service, but I think it supports your use case.
this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2026
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If i understand correctly addy.io just forwards incoming email to another public facing server. So OP would need to configure and selfhost their own server, even if it only ever receives mail from and sends mail to addy.io.
This might be a potential solution, but I dont think its really what they wanted.
I've been using them for a while and they've been pretty reliable
Thanks, it's not what I'm looking for, but a good thing to out in front of the email service.
I'm old school, and would set up Fetchmail. It can pull down either POP or IMAP (I haven't used POP in 25+ years, but I guess it works fine still). Then I'd run Dovecot or some other IMAP server on my host to read mail from there.
Yes, this is what I was looking for! Thank you.
Now I just have to find out how to configure everything to my liking.
My experience with dovecot has always been pleasantly surprising. doveadm in particular. Just the documentation seems less readable than it could be.
Best option is probably to look for providers that support custom domains, so you can point your domain directly to their mail servers. This usually require a paid subscription. Upside is that you retain control over your domain without having to host any email server.
The problem is that by putting a mail relay in between, while technically possible will break the SPF and DKIM chain for all emails that you forward. I don't think there is a good way around this since they check against the senders domain (and assuming that you can't get the email provider to trust your relay server)
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| DNS | Domain Name Service/System |
| IMAP | Internet Message Access Protocol for email |
| SMTP | Simple Mail Transfer Protocol |
[Thread #236 for this comm, first seen 14th Apr 2026, 01:40] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
I'm using Zoho to host my emails for my custom domain (I pay like $15 per year or something). I do have DKIM, SPF, and DMARC configured, as they're not hard to configure, as they're literally just a couple of DNS entries.
Moving to another provider would just be a matter of changing these DNS entries along with your MX record to point at your new provider.
This isn't really what OP is asking about.
They want emails to reside on their own hardware. So zoho might run the public mail server but OPS own server pulls the mail down from there.
Your basically setting up and email server with a gateway service for inbound and outbound mail delivery.
This is typically called a secure email gateway. I’m not sure if there are any designed for personal use.
Oracle Cloud has their Email Delivery service, which is basically just a straight SMTP proxy, and it's free. I believe proxies still need to be configured as a sender in SPF and have their own DKIM signing key, but Oracle will still send without them, although wildcard senders will require them.
This does, however, mean, you're running all of your emails through an oligarch-owned company and is hardly "self-hosted", right?
True, but it's only the sending emails and I don't have to worry about getting my ISP to set PTR records just to pass spam filters. Your domain's MX records still point to your server.