Funny 😄 pretty much asked myself the same thing, the day before yesterday.

Specifically, I have been looking for encrypted mail hosters supporting your own domain. Also, hosting in Europe on dedicated Hardware (or at least guaranteed European VPS), GDPR compliance and some sort of certification/ verification of the said requirements and their claims!

What I came up with:

• mailbox.org (never heard of it before, but pretty much has your requirements covered) <- Tor nodes, anonymous accounts(no personal data at all!)
• proton mail
• Tutanota (pretty young - but interesting concept)

I won’t cite their individual plans - that’s for you to figure out in detail.

The thing that bugs me with the Proton Mail and Tutanota, to effectively make use of their threat model/ encryption you have to use their Apps/ Software. EDIT: I’m currently using Microsoft365 - with it you are pretty much locked in - I fear with Proton or Tutanota it’s the same. Migrating is a pain.

I’m trying mailbox.org at the moment - they got a 30-free trail.

uberspace might be what you are looking for. you get a fully maintained mail setup, 10GB of storage, a dozen preconfigured services, a nice wiki and a very cool team of nerds. starts at 5€/month and you can buy your own domain elsewhere (i use inwx).

I’ve been using Tutanota. They are kind of similar in principles to Protonmail, but until recently were dirt cheap at €12/yr (now €36/yr). The only “drawback” is that you can only access your mail through their app, this is a feature, not a bug, according to Tutao.

Your exact use case will vary as to what is “best” - I went with Fastmail $50/yr USD) after my research a few years ago based on features I wanted. But also based on things other services didn’t do.

• Fastmail offers granular, per-app passwords – I have a single password which has read-only access to IMAP in order to back up all the data on a timer. This feature is missing from many (many) other email providers - using the 80/20 rule, if they even offer it it’s a single password with full access (Mailfence, for example)
• Fast, reliable incoming instant delivery is needed. I have financial services which send 2FA style codes in email (the US Treasury website for example) and need to get those via a service which is top notch. I don’t get to choose how to consume this content, it’s email or nothing
• Fastmail allows for many domains easily, with a very nice DNS checker wizard to help you set up your records as well a keep checking them to ensure they stay correct.
• Fastmail supports not only your catchall, but quick and easy masked emails as well for one-time use. For example, when shutting down an account on some random site I don’t want to keep spamming me, you generate a masked email, change the email on that remote account and usually get a verification email to click a link, then shut down that remote account, then delete the masked email. More than one service keeps spamming you after you shut down an account
• Fastmail has a good spam catcher for me - it’s polling my decades old GMail and even catches spam that the GMail side miss, so I’d say it’s even one notch better than GMail at this.
• Fastmail offers full CardDAV (contacts) and CalDAV (calendar) access, which makes plugging it into any other app that supports this very easy - their DNS wizard helps you set up the service records. I use “DavX5” on my Android to sync all Contacts and Calendar outside of using the Fastmail app (which is a self contained app on Android, it’s not too bad)
• Fastmail has a really, really cool and easy to use Notes feature built right in that actually works without hassle. In essence it’s just an email folder where they manage HTML emails, but from a UI perspective on both the web app and mobile it’s presented as a “Notes” tab. This has come in so handy when I need to take a quick note on my mobile of any sort for looking at on a laptop later, etc.
• Proton and Tutanota are all about marketing their encryption and security, but the reality is most of my email interacts with the outside world and this doesn’t have any bearing in real life use.
• Proton doesn’t have “real” IMAP, you have to run some custom bridge software on your own which is highly undesirable for me; Tuta doesn’t offer any external client access of any sort. Basically, you’re either using their apps or website or you’re kinda out of luck

I also use Mailfence as a backup on a second domain, with the emails from Fastmail being synced over via IMAP (on both sides) on a timer into a subfolder, such that if one service goes down I have a second email route ready to use. Always have a backup plan, things break when you least expect it.

Protonmail for actual hosting and Cloudflare for free catch-all forwarding.

I can highly recommend purelymail.com. They allow multiple domains, users and catch all accounts. They are great value, with a flat rate $10 per year ‘simple’ price, or you can pay per resource which for most people works out cheaper.

Been with them for over a year and been really good. Had a slight issue setting up one domain and their support were friendly, emailed back and sorted it out straight away for me.

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What about Microsoft 365? The tenant itself is free and per account and month you pay about 5-10$ (depending on sibscription level).

With this you have the full MS Exchange experience, you get 1TB of OneDrive space and all the shebang.

As a single user or small household setup - I’m using Cloudflare email routing, with catchall, forwarded into my Gmail account for receive. For SMTP, I’m using a combination of mailjet.com and brevo.com, which both have fairly robust free tiers for personal/small business use and allow sending from [email protected].

I use Fastmail and it’s pretty reasonable, has some nice tie-ins with 1Password, alias emails, etc.

I have a couple domains that are very low volume for outgoing mail. I use Migadu. I’m happy with their cheapest tier ($19/year for both domains). They have catch-alls and many other nice features.

Edit: They have no hard limits on the number of addresses, users, or domains and such. They just want you to be reasonable. You choose a tier based on your average quantity of outgoing mails per day. Again, there are no hard limits; they won’t cut you off unless you abuse the system.

Check out PurelyMail. It’s $10 a year, unlimited custom domains, unlimited emails, privacy focused.

Side question. Does anybody know of a decent service that basically works as a smarthost for outgoing and will MX incoming emails back to a mail server I host? I’ve been self hosting email since the '90s and just don’t want all of my email stored elsewhere. The IP reputation chasing is just too much to deal with now.

Whatever hosting service you’re going to use, if you’re not afraid of a little bit of Lua coding, consider using imapfilter – it’s a swiss knife for backups, pre-sorting, hooks and migration.

imapfilter is a (criminally underrated, IMO) tool for writing e-mail rules in Lua, which allow you to do tons of things, but my favorite is migrating e-mail, regardless of account.

See, unlike most filtering/sorting systems which are either completely proprietary or limited to single account (exportable as Sieve, if you’re lucky), imapfilter does not care where each “end” of the rule is: you can write rule that migrates from account1/folder1 to account2/folder3.

This allows you to completely decouple any sorting, pre-processing, hook or backup system from the actual locations or providers you happen to be using, as well as it allows you to combine any number of locations in any simple or complex way you need. Whatever system you will end up creating will stay with you as long (as you can use IMAP locations), so you can really focus on making it work long-term and have it fit into the big picture.

I’ve been using it for almost 10 years and ever since it has changed my whole world of e-mail. I have constant set of rules that take e-mails from set of inboxes (each box for different purpose, each on different provider, for reasons) and sort them to folders on my “actual” account, where I get to read them on my terms. I also have several of rules that run custom scripts exporting CSV’s, etc. (The rules are Lua programs, after all, so sky is the limit.) If I ever need to migrate my domain to another service (believe it or not, happened more than once in 10 years), all I need to do is set up the new account as base for the rules, but all of my rules are always going to be preserved.

In my past work I actually used imapfilter to move all IMAP from company Gmail to a locally maintained (on company laptop) Dovecot instance so that I could eventually use a sane client to get my work done. (And because the instance was local, I could access my e-mail offline with best possible speed.) One could do a similar thing with personal/freelance e-mail – just run Dovecot somewhere at a trusted place (you won’t be sending/receiving e-mails here, you will be only using IMAP to IMAP commands, so none of the horrors of self-hosting e-mail apply) and use imapfilter to route all email there, then back up your dovecot folder and you’re all set.

Except for need of coding, the disadvantage is that, I need an independent machine that runs 24/7 in order to keep sorting the e-mail (I do it cron-based but you can also do it continually) but that has not been a problem for me as I’m the self-hosting-nerd that’s going to have such machine anyway.

I can’t recommend Migadu enough. I’m on the $99/year plan and have dozens of domains and clients with their own domains too, it’s easy to manage and does everything I need it to.