How I set up private email hosting for my family

Here’s how I actually set up my own private email hosting—sanger.io! I already finished choosing a private email hosting provider. So what was the next step?

I still had to choose a plan with my chosen provider (InMotion Hosting, which didn’t pay me anything for this) and make it official. The details are uninteresting; anybody could do that part.

Now the hard work (such as it was) began. I…

(1) Read over the domain host’s getting-started guide for email. InMotion’s is here, and if you have a different host, they’re bound to have some instructions as well. If you get confused, their excellent customer service department can hold your hand a lot.

(2) Created a sanger.io email address, since that’s what they said to do first. In case you want to email me, my username is ‘larry’. (Noice and simple, ey?) InMotion let me create an email address, and I was rather confused about how this could possibly work since I hadn’t pointed any DNS, hosted by NameCheap, to InMotion.

(3) Chose one of the domain hosts’s web app options. For a webmail app (InMotion gave me a choice of three), I went with Horde, which is, not surprisingly, a little bit clunky compared to Gmail, but so far not worse than ZohoMail; we’ll see. Unsurprisingly, when I tried to send an email from my old gmail account to my new @sanger.io account, the latter didn’t receive it. Definitely need to do some DNS work first…

(4) Pointed my domain name to the right mail server. In technical jargon, I created an MX record on my DNS host. This was surprisingly simple. I just created an MXE Record on NameCheap, my DNS host for sanger.io, and pointed it to an IP address I found on InMotion. So basically, I just found the right place to paste in the IP address, and it was done. Now I can send and receive email via sanger.io (at least via webmail).

(5) Created email addresses for my other family members. Very easy.

(6) Installed a desktop email client. Why? I wasn’t using one before because I just used Gmail in a browser and Apple’s mail app on my phone. I could keep using webmail (on InMotion) but a desktop client is apt to be nicer. I’d tell you which one I used, but I’m not confident it’s particularly good.

(7) Installed a new email client for my phone. As I no longer trust or want to support Apple if I can at all help it, I wanted to stop using their email client. I paid $10 for a privacy-touting mail client which is quite good so far: Canary Mail.

(8) Change the mail address registered with the big, consequential apps and services. This is the most labor-intensive step, and the step I most dreaded. Sure, it was a pain. But it turns out it was tremendously satisfying to be able to tell them to stop using my wretched Gmail address and instead to start using my slick new permanent and personalized address. Was that fun? Heck yeah it was! Anyway, such apps and services include

• The massive Internet and tech services: Google, Microsoft, Apple.
• The big social media/community accounts: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Quora, Medium, LinkedIn.
• Companies I pay money to: Amazon, Netflix, PayPal, Patreon, InMotion, GoDaddy, NameCheap, Heroku, LifeLock, The Great Courses, any other bills.
• Important stuff: my employer, the bank, medical info systems/apps, dentist, Coinbase.
• Family, friends, and work and business people. Send them the message three times spread over a month or two, because if they’re like me, they ignore such emails or don’t act on them right away, and some old aunt of mine will keep sending mail to my gmail address for years and years. (I haven’t actually done this one yet, but will soon. Gmail makes exporting of all your relevant contact info surprisingly difficult.)

(9) Create a Gmail forwarder! Buh-bye, Google! No need even to visit your crappy, biased, would-be totalitarian service for email any longer.

(10) Clean up and consolidation. There are a zillion little consequences when you change your email on all these big services, and I expect I’ll be dealing with the consequences (nothing major!) for a few days or weeks to come. Among the things I know I’ll have to do: (a) Install and configure mail clients on my laptop and iPad, and in other ways get those other devices working as expected again. (b) Update various email clients with address book information, as needed. (c) Actually collect my contacts from Google and Apple (harder than it sounds). (d) Change entries in my password manager from @gmail.com to @sanger.io. (e) Actually, get a new password manager…but that’s a whole nuther thang. (f) Get Microsoft and Google and whatever else to forget my contacts…ditto.

This was installment three in my series on how I’m locking down my cyber-life.