I’m trying to move away from Google and replace my Gmail account. But reading about the different options, I’m realizing I don’t really understand email at all - e.g. the difference between the client and the domain name, the different protocols, encryption.
Does anyone have articles or books to suggest as a “Basics of Email: 101”? Thank you!
(Have read you’re not interested in self hosting - I think that’s very sensible. It’s a lot of work and even then, very difficult to do it well and be reliable)
Suggest finding a reputable email provider, and they will require payment.
I recently moved from gmail to proton. The migration process was very smooth, with proton copying over all my existing email and calendars from gmail. However, their web clients are very slow in comparison (since they’re encrypted - click on an email and it’s 3 seconds or so to open, an eternity!). I find that annoying enough that I’ve setup thunderbird via a proxy, but that has negated some of the ease of use.
There are quite a few good options around, maybe others will chip in with recommendations.
Once you have a new mail client, your user@gmail.com address will not be valid. However, if you want it to, you can keep your old email account with gmail as well, and have it forward all incoming email to your new home. That allows you to gradually move your accounts over at your own speed. I think this is important as there will be more than you expect of them, but the process isn’t hard.
Most of those new providers will also allow you to use a personal domain, and multiple users. So you can register a domain that stays with you - that’s the domain.org bit of your email address, and multiple users - the bit before the @.
The good providers will have guides and documentation about helping you through this also.
What is your goal? Do you want to host your emails yourself? That’s going to be a huge hassle. Best case scenario nobody accepts your mails because they suspect you’re a spammer. Worst case scenario you get hacked and actually do send out spam.
You can also just switch to another email provider like proton. Then you don’t have to deal with any of the stuff, except for giving all people and services your new address.
Good question, I don’t think I’m interested in hosting emails myself. The goal is likely going to be to choose a different provider. But that being said, I’m curious about what “hosting email” even means. The outcome I’m looking for is to be able to have enough understanding to compare different service providers and understand the differences between them.
The thing is, you don’t need to know anything for that. Things like pricing, storage amount, maybe anti spam measurements, maybe quality of the interface are much more important. The underlying technology is more or less irrelevant.
But let me try to give you a quick overview to hopefully sate your curiosity:
The server program to send and receive emails is called an SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) server. It receives the mails sent from other company’s SMTP servers. The so called MX (Mail eXchange) entry in the domain system tells everyone where to find that server. Popular open source servers are Postfix, Exim and Sendmail.
If you have an email program (the email client) on your computer or smartphone it will log into the SMTP server and give it the mail you want to send. Popular email clients are Thunderbird, Outlook and I think the one on MacOS is just called Mail. If you are used to send your mail from the Gmail website that website is the email client.
SMTP does not give you anything to actually read the mails. That is usually done through an IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) server. Your client connects to the IMAP server to get a list of all your mail folders and the mails in there and whether they are marked as read, unread, important, etc. Usually the username and password for SMTP server and IMAP server are the same for convenience.
In terms of encryption your connection to these servers from the mail client and the connections between SMTP servers can be encrypted. But the mails themselves, ie what is stored on the server, are not encrypted.
There are some standards like GPG (GNU Privacy Guard) to encrypt mails but they are not very widespread. And most importantly they require sender and recipient of the mail to have the encryption set up. They encrypt the content of the mail but not the meta data like the sender and recipient, send date, ip addresses of sending and receiving SMTP servers, etc.
Hope that helps. Feel free to ask questions.
In my opinion all that you need is a new mail provider/host of your choice and an own domain if you want to make future moving of mail providers easier.
Hosting an own mail server should not be your main focus when making an initial switch away from Gmail.
Thank you, yes I agree and I’m not interested in hosting my own mail server. I’m just realizing that I don’t really understand the difference between a mail provider and a domain, and I’ve run into issues before with different mail protocol settings (like when I tried to connect a school outlook account to Thunderbird and couldn’t get it to work because of (I think) IMAP settings).
It’s something I use all the time, and I’d like to better understand how it works.
A domain is a url, like oaksprout.com. A provider is a server/computer that the domain points at. Many services sell both together at an upcharge, but a domain itself usually costs like ~$15 a year
If an IP address is a mailing address, imagine a domain as a way to pay the post office so people can just address it to oaksprout. You could have them forward your mail to your house, or you could send it to a PO box or business address, and change it whenever you want
The provider is like the mailbox in this metaphor… It receives the mail and holds it for you
In your case Google would be the host/provider of your Gmail e-mail service and gmail.com is the domain name of the Gmail e-mail service.
Having your own domain name would allow you to keep you e-mail address even when switching your e-mail host. Which means you would not have to bother with re-registering you new e-mail address for every service or newsletter again.
yourname@yourdomain.com would always be yours no matter which e-mail provider you choose, IF they support a personal domain.
I imagine going through a “setup your own mail server guide” such as https://www.linuxbabe.com/mail-server/setup-basic-postfix-mail-sever-ubuntu will give you the basics or at least enough to allow you to ask the correct questions to get the answers you want.
It has short explanations of what the different DNS records do (A, MX, PTR, etc) and such woven into the guide.
Good idea, I will have a look at this. Thank you.
I don’t have a book, but it’s generally like this: providers offer you an email account. Usually, the provider also offers a website where you can access that email account (“webmail”). Some providers also offer mobile apps for access. Email accounts follow some standards, and almost all of them can be accessed via standard email clients (e.g. Thunderbird).
Most have a limited size for your account (e.g. 1GB) which has to fit all your attachments etc. If it’s full, you can’t receive more emails. Some have automated spam filters etc. Many are free, but their webmail usually contains ads.
This: https://mwl.link/run-your-own-mail-server.html
I don’t have this book by MWL, but, when I got my first Sysadmin job in 2015, I took over a network almost entirely run on FreeBSD, and I was gifted a couple of other books of his, in particular his ZFS volumes with Allan Jude, and I can say that his work is easy to read and good at giving you the most basic raw facts of the matter. If you really want to understand email, read this book and I guarantee you will get all the information you need.
I am not his marketer, just a person who was helped immensely by his work. He’s on the Fedi as well, you can search in Mastodon.
