Hi folks. Executive summary of what I'm looking for:

1. I want to find a reasonably trustworthy email service that allows IMAP connections so I can pull my email down using fetchmail and store it locally, deleting it from the remote server, rather than keeping it there. With some services there are real questions whether things will work under Linux. I need recommendations.

2. Once I've found that service and gotten things working, I want to obtain a personal domain and arrange for email forwarding at that domain, so that all email sent to my_username@my-personal-domain ends up at my_username@the-email-service-i-just-obtained. And I want that to be changeable, so that if I switch email services down the road, I can simply point my_username@my-personal-domain to the new email service rather than the old one, and thus not have to tell folks to change the email address they use for me. I want it to be transparent to the folks I interact with, the mailing lists I'm on, etc. I need to be pointed in the right direction on this.

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ISSUE #1: changing email services.

The ISP we have used since 2001 appears to be circling the drain. They recently sent out a notice saying they'd no longer be providing all hosted services, including email, starting at the end of this month. So, we need to find a new email service.

I really don't want to have all my emails from 1991-2018 stored and backed-up locally, and then starting with 2019 stored and backed up on some third-party service. Right now I use fetchmail to pull down my email (via IMAP) from my ISP and pass it to the local SMTP server for delivery. I'd love to continue to do this.

Protonmail was recommended to me, and I've liked what I've read about their dedication to security/privacy/etc. But their support for Linux seems to be in early days. In particular, supposedly one needs their Linux bridge (which is still in beta), which in turn can be obtained only by purchasing service. I don't want to buy their service and then find out the bridge doesn't do what I need and I can't establish a good/compliant IMAP connection with them.

Does anyone have any ideas on good email providers that will allow IMAP connections and play nicely with Linux?

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ISSUE #2: a personal domain for persistent email addresses

Once I get the new email service established, we're going to have to tell everyone our new addresses, change mailing list subscriptions, email address for web registrations, etc. to infinity. This is going to suck. I don't want for us to have to do it again two or three or seven years down the road.

It struck me that one way to minimize the likelihood of having to do this again is to register a personal domain and keep it up to date, with email addresses at that personal domain forwarding to whatever email service we're using. But I'm not entirely sure what I need to do to make this happen. Every time I've wandered over to Network Solutions or GoDaddy's webpages to look at domain registration, there's a ton of additional stuff they seem to want to sell you, and it's not clear what's needed and what's not. Furthermore, there's no information on what you need to do to set up mail forwarding or whatever. I know this can't be a new idea -- other people have to have done this before -- but I've googled and haven't found a page that's straightforward enough on what I need to do.

Can anyone point me to decent quality docs/HOWTOs/whatever on how I can go about making this happen? If such really doesn't exist, then I guess I need any guidance folks have the time for.

Thanks very, very much.

There's a couple of places where (in my opinion) you're needlessly complicating things and re-inventing the wheel.

Why the forwarding? Register a domain and find an e-mail provider that lets you use your own domain, most of the paid e-mail service providers allow this.

You also mention inbound IMAP to retrieve mails and then pass this through your local SMTP server for delivery, why are you passing it through a local server?

I outsourced e-mail handling years ago and have never had problems. First did this for the company I worked with where I outsourced for 100+ users and saw an immediate increase in user satisfaction, not being tied to a local mail server etc. I now use the same provider for my own stuff, they give me 30Gb of cloud storage space for mail and other files, extremely robust spam handling, server side rules, supports pop/imap, supports forwarding directly in to my own SMTP server if I want to, allows me to host a LOT of domain names under the same account, has optional 2 factor authentication, document editing via browser, calendar, and also has native Android apps for all of this, and charges around $60/Year per individual mailbox. Yes, I'm enthusiastic about them, but I've had no problems for years now.

I'm not surprised of that!

This is my ignorance. I figured that when I registered the domain, I'd have to arrange for the registrar to populate the MX records or something like that; I did not know that the email providers themselves will do this.

As I understand it (perhaps incorrectly), that's how fetchmail wants to do things by default. It doesn't handle delivery into system mailboxes. Wrong?

That sounds very good. Are you comfortable saying who it is?

Thanks much for replying!

You'll have to maintain your MX records but this is relatively easy to do.

Any reason you want them in system mailboxes rather than just pointing your mail client(s) at the IMAP account(s)? I have to admit I've exclusively used web clients for years now.

Sure, G-Suite from Google https://gsuite.google.com/ (and now let's wait for the tinfoil hat wearers to crawl out the woodwork!)

G-Suite has been good for me.

Also, take a look at Bluehost. I've been using them for my personal mail/website for ten years. They're very flexible. Not particularly cheap. Reliability has been good.

Do you contact your registrar and say "point to _____", then contact the email provider and say "this is my domain"?

That's a good question, since the client I use (claws) can do that. I currently have fetchmail on a five-minute poll; if my computer's up, nothing sits at the provider for more than five minutes. Historically, this was because IMAP access through the graphic mh clients that existed back then wasn't an option. I think I was uncomfortable with my email sitting on the provider's server for any length of time; but now, 17 years later, I'm not sure I remember why. If they wanted to do something nefarious with my email, they wouldn't need to rely on it staying at the server longer (or really, any time at all) in order to do it; and the chances of data loss probably aren't any higher there than they are on my machine. I guess the only reason I can think of right now is that there have been times when I've wanted to poll accounts with multiple providers and pool them together, and fetchmail doing that for me was easier than manually doing it with the client.

Thanks much, I'll look at it!

Thank you!

If you leave DNS provision with your registrar then they should provide a mechanism to edit your own DNS records. With G-Suite I add and verify ownership of the domain and then set the MX records through my registrar's control panel.

I can generally register a new domain name and have e-mail handling done in about 10-15 minutes now.