Extracts from a mailop email list:
- little known control panel, for creating such email/web servers: Aetolos - secure open source control panel for virtual hosting
- Roundcube is the default webmail client these days, I am not sure if its a "replacement" for gmail, but it is very efficient and works great on mobile devices
- Postfix+dovecot is the most common combination for running your own services, once combined they offer pretty much all the features most people need (SMTP/IMAP/POP3/etc)
- ClamAV anti-virus is said to require at least 4GB of ram to load its default data set.
- For a full featured modern package with reasonable spam resistance I can vouch for Mailu which requires Docker as a basis. Under the hood, this is postfix as MTA, dovecot for IMAP/POP3, rspamd as anti-spam solution (I think the SPF/DKIM/DMARC stuff is located there, too), Roundcube or RainLoop as webmail (both pretty usable, probably not as feature-rich as GMail), PostgreSQL for account persistence, and REDIS as memory cache mostly for the rspamd engine. Supports Letsencrypt out of the box, of course. It does take some effort to set up the basics right (Docker and configuration) but then runs very reliably and is a breeze to manage. Sadly, it does not integrate Mailman, so I had to do that manually, which is kind of a pain.
- If you have a reasonable insight into unix things, you could do worse than going with OpenBSD and an OpenSMTPD setup along the lines of what Aaron Poffenberger describes in his tutorial here: opensmtpd for the real world mail server tutorial (originally a BSDCan session I believe).
- I’ve been running similar setups for years (but with exim as the MTA mainly for inertia reasons), documented mainly in articles you can find via the first link in my signature. The most comprehensive is perhaps Effective Spam and Malware Countermeasures - Network Noise Reduction Using Free Tools , others will be tagged with keywords like spam, mail, spamd, smtp and so forth.
- Gmail's webmail interface is one of the worst possible. It is very inefficient to operate, counter-intuitive, hides many important information from the user etc., not mentioning that it is simply ugly. There are many much nicer and more user-friendly webmails, like for example already mentioned Roundcube.
- Here I found an overview of various webmail apps, with screenshots of some. You can pick something that suits you: Top 15 Self-hosted open-source free web-based email clients
- I've begun with OpenSMTP, but I've switched to Postfix as the primary developer has stopped actively working on it. I now run Postfix, Dovecot, Solr (for the search), and Rspamd, and it's working perfectly!
- By the time you go through all the hassle of managing spam filters and getting your IP warmed up, Fastmail at $50/yr/mailbox looks pretty attractive.
- If you can find someone who resells Tucows' white label e-mail, they have a pretty good product for about $10/mailbox/yr for 5GB, $20 for 10GB, $30 for 15GB.
- take a look at mailcow dockerized. It's all you need (mail server, sogo groupware, antispam/-virus, 2fa,...). Put it on a VPS or your NAS and be happy.