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If I only have a vps would I have to host my own email server to have email with a domain I bought?
user3028938
Member
in Help
I suppose I would have to do all that myself if there isn't a webhosting type of cpanel? It is just a debian install for a forum I would like to setup, if I ever get round to it. 
I would get a new domain for that but I thought I would also like to have email with it as well.
Is it very involved? I looked into that in the past. I don't mind doing work but the main deterrent I read about at the time was that your emails would most likely just end up in spam folders so no point doing it.
I saw a post on reddit /r/selfhosted not long ago of a guy showing off they were not spamboxed with their own email servers but I was not interested in reading it at the time so don't know how they got around it.
Comments
Managing email is hard, let the pros handle it, peace of mind.
there's mxroute and cranemail specifically for emails, you can explore their plans....they are specifically designed for emails
If you want to selfhost, u will have to keep in mind that your IP should be clean and not blacklisted. You can use Mailcow or stalwart mail to self host email....
VPS and email aren't necessarily related and I'm not clear what your goal is.
Are you saying you have a VPS and you want to host your own email on it?
It's doable but I'm not sure it's worth the efforts unless you're doing it for fun or learning purposes or something of the sort. Nothing wrong with that of course.
Help us answer you by perhaps restating your question. There's tons of knowledge here mixed in with the funny responses!
It depends what you want to achieve. Generally, there is a strong sentiment here against self-hosting DNS and emails. I successfully do both
but yes, it is hard, especially with emails.
Thanks for your patience.
Hmm, well I do like learning and self-hosting is satifying but in terms of time and since I want to run a forum as well I wonder if it might be too much work.
I just would like to use the domain I use for the forum for emails too. I just bought a bare bones ssh login vps as I wasn't thinking about email services before but now I am.
In this case is it better to get more normal cpanel webhosting? How is email handled differently in this case vs. self-hosting?
Is there another route? I am not really a fan of cpanel and would prefer not deal with it again if I didn't have to. I much rather doing everything I want via shh/command line.
Well I have been a python programmer some years ago for a good few years so I guess not harder than that? How are your emails? Do you get through spam?
As a user said above the IP must be clean that rules out the current server I guess since I noticed it was blacklisted on reddit so probably been spammed other places too or maybe not. Certainly not virginal that is for sure.
So my main goal is run a forum with phpbb but I would also like to be able to use email with the domain I buy for that forum. Like [email protected]
It would definitely be better for you to opt for a separate email service. There are loads of advantages:
For SSH/command line, you can use APIs of the relevant service and automate the process. This is actually what I do.
In 2025 it's definitely not "difficult" as aforementioned tools: mailcow, Stalwart and more make the deployment trivial but you will still need to make sure IPs are clean. Yes, you can use relays to get around this but then why not use a provider in the first place?
Yes for this usecase, go for MXroute or NameCrane. If you want to pay more, you can also go for Google or Microsoft.
Also note this is strictly for transactional emails. If you want to send marketing emails it's different.
Like others I have self-hosted email in the past and it is doable but needs work.
If you're doing it for personal use, don't self host email. If you're doing it for business with a bunch of mailboxes, go for it.
Can you explain the difference here to use that vs. the webhosting cpanel. In the latter case you only pay once for the webhosting and you can host a website and get access to use email with your domain too but from what you are writing here it is going to be 2 costs - vps and separate email hoster?
Well since it is for transactional and not business or profit driven I don't know that I want to pay again just for having email on my domain.
I was able to get that free on shared webhosting. Still trying to get clear how the webhosting providers who offer this service for free are providing email capability and why I can't do the same myself somehow without paying?
EDIT: Wow! $49 per year for mxroute cheapest option! No way I want to use it! It might be a good price but I am not paying it for some little pet project. I would have maybe if it was a couple of dollars but I don't wanna pay anything substantial just for a little hobby horse.
Don't understand this? I thought it would be the other way round in that if it was for personal it would not matter so much yet business you would not want to play around with something that may not be reliable.
So can you explain your reasoning for the comment?
If you have shared hosting account with email you are 100% able to use it for your basic email needs. The difference is like you have said: one is email-only other is email+hosting. The difference is the same as specialist vs. generalist - both get the job done but sometimes you want the specialist whereas in most cases you do not need it. A decent hosting provider uses an email relay which means you get decent email with your hosting - this is a completely fine use case.
Understandable
You can do the same. The hosting provider is already paying for an email relay so the cost of it is included in your hosting plan.
You can do it for free. The difference is your emails will likely go into spam (receiving is often not an issue) which means you will need to pay for a relay so back to square one.
Search this forum and you will find deals. That being said, if you have shared hosting, you can continue to use that email. And there are cheaper options e.g. Purelymai is $10 per year. Zoho Mail is free for 5 accounts.
Install aapanel or cyberpanel and configure email. That's all you need to do.
you can checkout cheaper plans here -> mxroute.blackfriday there's also a reseller of mxroute its -> onepoundemail.co.uk or https://my.onepoundemail.co.uk/order/forms/a/NTUyNw== [aff-link]
for cranemail its just -> cranemail.com or https://namecrane.com/r/120/email [aff-link]
If you have vps and want to self-host just install hestiacp and be done with it.. Probably need 3-4GB ram vps. That is no guarantee that your mails will land in inbox, so there is option to use mail relay in hestia control panel. MxRoute works great for this, or you can use some free ones.. Search them on google, there are some that gives you some hundreds+ mails free per month...
Or just use Zoho, free for 1 domain with 5 mailboxe's
Well, it is always better to separate these things. So, email on one server, forum is on another. The reason has already been outlined - if one goes down, the other one does not. If you mean how emails is handled in case of cpanel v self-hosting, I would say that the actual set up looks very similar, so you have to self-host a stack (and there are various ready-to-use stacks already like mailcow, mail-in-a-box, redmail, poste.io, Modoboa and many others), set up your domain(s) in there and start using it. With self-hosting, you also have to manage your IP reputation and also things like correct SPF, DKIM records (good email stack will suggest you those DNS records post installation). IP rep is probably the most challenging part. If you are lucky enough to get certain not very clean subnet, you may struggle with non-delivery errors to say hotmail and MS may decided not to delist this subnet from their filters without any explanation.
Yes, apart from self-hosting as I described above, you can also do hosted email. This is where you can use MXRoute or Cranemail. They are basically hosting the whole stack for you, manage IPs rep and you only use them. This is what, in my observation, the most people on LET prefer to do.
Hold on, there is yet another route. You can self-host your stack + use MXRoute/Crane to delivery emails. Since MX/Crane look well after their IPs, you will likely have 0 delivery issues but all your emails will be stored on the server of your choice and MX/Crane will be used only to deliver emails.
Yes, I do get spam and in most cases it ends where it should be - in spam folder but rarely it goes into Inbox, which is fine for me.
I think reddit blacklists all corporate subnets these days.
I'm afraid I'm not particularly good at explaining the first steps to newbies but I'll try.
First, hosting and email are different things and can be related but need not be related. You can perfectly well run your own forum on your VPS using your domain and have emails to/from your domain be handled by someone else like e.g. Mxroute / @jar.
While many say that handling email yourself that is, running your own mail server, is oh sooo difficult and problematic and that your emails usually end up in the spam folder, I do run my own mail server since many years and >= 99.5% of my emails do arrive in the recipients inbox. So, it still is definitively possible and not very difficult.
That said I still would strongly advise a newbie to not setup and run their own email server but rather to have an experienced professional like jar do it, and MXroute is cheap enough.
Reason: while running your email server isn't super hard it also is not a super easy task, especially for a newbie. Plus, getting your feet wet and learning and doing your first steps in having and using your own VPS plus a forum on it can be a quite full plate by itself (setting up and configuring a database, a web server, fiddling with PHP, etc. ...). Btw, make sure that your VPS is beefy enough!
Thanks that explains things better to me. So webhosting + email are still using some external mail hosting just it is included in the price?
I do remember roundcube was offered most times, and some other one I forgot.
I just looked up roundcube though and that is apparently open source in which case were the webhosting providers doing the same self-hosting stack I would have to do myself, so not an external supplier in the case of roundcube?
That would be a problem and most likely would end up costing as much per year then as just paying for a an email host like mxroute route wouldn't it? Ram is what ramps up vps cost from what I recall on previous research and I usually just go with very basic specs otherwise for my little ssh and scripting projects.
Hah, so would end up paying for a more expensive vps and mxroute. Might as well just go with the latter only then.
What search term am I looking for exactly? Still not sure what this stuff is called?
Sounds like the most promising idea so far.
I just want the easiest and cheapest route to use the domain I buy for the forum at the moment. I might look at self hosted options later but as email is only an 'afterthought' and the forum is the main place I want to spend my time then I don't want too complicated a process for the email now. Maybe I would look at other options later but most easy for now is best to not divert attention away from setting up the forum.
Perhaps easiest and cheapest are one or the other? but zoho sounds promising.
This is what I really don't like and the whole reason I want to start my own forum. It is the same kind of idea why I hate social media and increasingly websites, with cloudflare being the latest anti spam detector where you are getting flagged for not having done anything wrong but in some neighbourhood of bad behavior so you get lumped with the bad ones. Same with social media with their BS rules and regulations getting worse and worse.
So desperately trying to manage IP reputation sounds like something I would hate as more of the same rubbish as above.
Yes better to outsource then but in this case might as well do it all on mxroute, if that is an option, rather than self host, paying for a stronger vps, as mentioned in another reply, then also paying for mxroute too.
Actually I didn't mean do you receive spam. I meant do you send messages successfully without them being flagged as spam by the recipient's provider.
Hate them and the extreme censorship they promote. I have blocked them now including from search results. Feel much better for it.
Hey I am not that much of a newbie you are making me out to be. I have been using vps's for like 15 years for the latter part with various python projects I wrote when I did it for money but not done that for a few years.
I have also used linux for almost 10 years as sole OS.
It is only the self-hosting email and forums side of things I am new to.
I agree with your last paragraph though that I don't want to bog myself down with learning the email part right now as that is just an afterthought and the forum stuff is what I want to learn and focus on as the main thing.
Yes, I successfully send emails without them being marked as spam.
How? with the clean IP management methods discussed above?
Any reasonable mail service provider (proton.me, tuta.com, even google.com...) offer own domain mail hosting in the payed plans.
Too much trouble hosting own mail server imho.
Yes, it is IP management and also I am not doing any bulk send, do not send emails that look like newsletters etc.
The zoho mail looks just right. Free and offers domain hosting. Thanks for the recommendation @xmok @emperor. Then I can concentrate on the forum stuff.
I do find it ironic that signing up for a new email they ask you for an email address to sign. That is what I am wanting to sign up for...duh!
It has become like getting a new house to live. There must be an unbroken chain of references from one to the next.