Recently, I ran into a problem with my old Buffalo LinkStation (LS-QVL) NAS: one of the hard drives failed, but I didn’t receive any email notification about it. That’s obviously a serious issue if you rely on these alerts to react in time — ideally before the second drive in the RAID also fails.

The problem with these older devices is often outdated firmware. In particular, the built-in software lacks support for modern TLS versions when sending emails. As a result, the NAS can no longer communicate with modern SMTP servers (such as Gmail or other up-to-date providers). On top of that, SSH access is not enabled by default.

I’ve hosted my own Mailserver in various configurations since more than 6 years now. Since then I’ve taken multiple breaks from hosting it myself and explored other solutions for hosting emails with your own domain names.

Because my own Mailserver has lately problems (downtimes) I wanna explore other possibilities of hosting my email addresses.

So let’s take a look…

Self-hosting (VPS, Tools like Mailcow, Mailu, etc)

You simply setup a Mailserver with software like Mailcow, Mailu or Mail-in-a-Box on a virtual Server and manage it yourself.