Creating a personal email service. Possible? How?

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An email service with only one account as an alternative to G-mail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc...
I'd like to get away from third party email providers entirely.
I'd prefer to use a Linux distribution and avoid Windoze.

Does software exist for this?
Can it be done?
What if any costs will be involved?

Any input will be appreciated.

If you mean get your own email address, maybe

[email protected]

You can create your own website and you get email addresses included.

I bought the name at namecheap.com, and I bought web hosting at serversanddomains.com, but they changed hands since I bought it. You can also buy the name and the website at one place, for instance, godaddy.com

Then many of them use this software called cPanel, I think it runs on Linux/Apache, but don't hold me to it. I am by far so NOT an expert on hosting, there have GOT to be Aspies with more experience than me. I had all these elaborate plans, then I found online gaming and said to hell with it. I still use my site for hosting pics. I costs me like $30/year, so I just keep it, some times I need to host a picture, but more and more websites let you upload pics any more.

I do not use the email service, I started with yahoo, picked up a gmail when I got an Android phone, and just never bothered to switch over. Keep in mind you would have to pay that $30/year.

There is probably a cheaper way to get your own stuff - I would Google it.

I'm assuming you want a name of the form [email protected]. this is fairly easy to do. This is important if you want to be taken seriously as a software developer.

I use Google apps for business for my personal email accounts. First you need to buy a domain. Hover are a really nice company here, then you set up Google apps, it'll cost you a few pounds, not much. Wire the two together following the instructions and there you go, your own email address.

The advantage of using Google apps is that you get the best spam protection, and good deliverability.

Best of luck with it!

If you know someone with their own domain and you have a fixed IP address, they could set up the necessary DNS records.

For example, if their domain is example.com, they could set up slave.example.com for your fixed IP address and point the MX records to it. Then you can assign yourself whatever username you want, say xyz. Then you would have an e-mail address of [email protected].

That said, it's not generally a good idea to do that.

My first own domain email was Postfix which I installed on a shared Linux box. I felt pretty cool until about a million pieces of spam filled up the little shared hard drive and it fell over and lost my emails.

I think every web developer should know how to do the basic things like install LAMP on a fresh Ubuntu box, or set up a DNS server. I'm happy to let other people handle that stuff for me now, but it's good to have some clue about how things fit together.

That's true - before I tried configuring sendmail I never even thought about killing myself.