Know nothing about web servers but

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…I am trying to think of a way to not be at the mercy of web based email providers that sell my information to third party advertisers. I know about Lavabit.com email but their email accounts don’t have enough options for me.

I was going to try this way of setting up a server:

Building off of DuckDuckGo’s idea of privacy, I want to start my own personal (just for me, no end users) web based email server so I don’t have to deal with third party advertisers or somebody else managing my email service. And then just give that email address out to friends who can contact at my own server that I run myself so I know no one is managing my email other than me.

Does this make any sense to someone who knows about this stuff or do I not understand web servers? Once I have my own web server set up, would the emails be on my computer? I prefer if they were completely web based so I don’t use up more space on my computer.

Is this or something close to it possible? Thanks!

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I get what you’re saying, all you really need to do is search for a unmanaged VPS(they’re cheap and have plenty of bandwidth) then install a mail server on it. I recommend postfix, it’s a easy and nice mail server. Then get a domain and make a MX record so you can whatever@yourdomain.com. Then you can install mail clients if you want, squirrel mail etc…ultimately just google “setup mail server on a vps” to get you going.

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Hi,
Amazon and other cloud providers are a pretty good way to go. If you don’t have much of a budget then do the following:

  • Get a hold of a low end server 64bit motherboard that supports RAID (doesn’t need to be Hardware RAID)
  • Install get ClearOS Enterprise. It does not cost very much and comes with a great mail server, excellent web server and the gateway features for filtering bad stuff are really solid. It can also be used as a Domain Controller depending on the mode that you set it to.
  • I suggest ClearOS, as many of the other Server platforms will take significantly more knowledge/time to get a functioning machine, and the last thing you want is to have your email server successfully targeted by SPAMMERS do to an ill conceived DNS or unprotected mail server.

Steve