Goodbye self hosting email

The end of an era ! I’ve self hosted my email for more than a decade, starting with Lotus Domino and then moving on to an open source solution (mailcow).

While I’m still very happy with mailcow, the administration of the mail system became a burden. In addition, I had to upgrade or move to a newer Linux system, and the costs have gone up considerably over the past couple of years.

Enter Proton mail !

These Swiss guys (and/or girls) pride themselves on privacy and security, so that sounded good.

https://proton.me/

Use this referal link if you want to sign up : https://pr.tn/ref/YRGNC3PGD360

Migration

Mail

The migration of my mail accounts went smoothly. There’s an IMAP migration tool, that I could connect to my mailcow instance; and that simply copied the mail over. This took a couple of days to complete (not bad).

Calendar

No automatic migration of calendar entries, but export / import worked fine.

Contacts

Contacts was a bit more complicated, since mailcow only exports to ldif format.
So I first used Thunderbird to convert import that ldif into an addressbook, then exported that addressbook again to VCard (vcf) format. And then imported that vcf file into Proton Mail.

Setup

After configuring DNS using a simple step by step guide on the proton site, it’s time to configure your email aliases. I haven’t finished that yet…

The interface to actually configure the mail aliases is slooooow , it would be helpful to have a bulk configuration tool.

First thoughts

  • the linux bridge application for mail (to Thunderbird) is nice; but it’s missing both the calendar and contacts.
  • the Android mail app is sometimes really slow
  • I’m really disappointed by the missing synchronization for contacts and calendar entries
  • the interface to define your email address is clunky. It’s missing a bulk configuration.

To be continued

Let’s see how this goes ! For now, I’m happy to be rid of the administration of a mail server (certificates, constant updates, spam, …)