How To Set Up Your Own Email Server

Free program gives you back privacy and control

If you’re aprivacylover in search of a nice alternative to popular web-mail providers like Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo, you’re in luck. You can learn how to set up your own email server and escape the routine scanning of emails these providers perform on millions of users, and enjoy a safe and private environment for your emails.

Personal or private email servers live in your own space, unlike the usual Apple, Google and Microsoft server farms. This way, you can set up your own disk drive and fully control how your emails are accessed, managed and stored.

For small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) that want to cut costs, administrating mails may seem expensive. Similarly, running their mail servers seems difficult because of the incessant spamming. They probably also don’t have the in-house tech personnel or tools to properly configure and run one, while managing the threats.

This is why many SMBs outsource to external providers. However, this comes with hidden risks like loss of control over your mail security, privacy intrusion and confidentiality risks, delivery problems from sharing a server, and more.

Thankfully, you can run a secure, spam-filtered mail server for your personal or small-business use. In this guide, we’ll walk you through how to create and set up your own email server right on your PC.

What You’ll Need To Set Up a Personal Email Server

How To Set Up The Email Server

The easier shortcut to setting up your email server is hiring an IT person to do it for you. Once the initial setup is ready, you can change the preferences to your liking.

If you can’t afford paying someone to do it for you, it’s still possible to set it up yourself.

For the purposes of this guide, we’ll walk you through a tutorial on how to set up your email server based on the Windows operating system. We’ll usehMailServer, a free and flexible email server for Windows that lets you handle all your emails without relying on your ISP to manage them for you.

It’s one of the most popular email servers for Windows that’s easy to use and install, and offers basic features like security and built-in spam protection by SpamAssassin.

Follow the steps below to complete the setup.

Your hMailServer is configured with basic options.

Congratulations, you’ve just set up your own email server.

In order to read or write your emails, get a webmail client like Outlook or Thunderbird. If you want to use a computer application instead, type your email address as your username, and authentication type is the password.

While hosting your own email server requires some effort and precaution from you, it’s worth having if you don’t want the hassles and insecurities of popular web-mail providers.

Remember to keep your server IP and domain in check, always looking to see if there are any issues like public blacklisting as some providers can do this for incoming emails, due to incorrect DNS settings.

Elsie is a technology writer and editor with a special focus on Windows, Android and iOS. She writes about software, electronics and other tech subjects, her ultimate goal being to help people out with useful solutions to their daily tech issues in a simple, straightforward and unbiased style. She has a BCom degree in Marketing and currently pursuing her Masters in Communications and New Media.Read Elsie’s Full Bio

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