You don’t specifically have to use SimpleLogin. I only suggested it because I use it. You could use a number of other services like AnonAddy, Forward Email, Firefox Relay, etc. for aliases. For email hosting, you could choose any provider of your choosing, doesn’t have to be a mega corp.

Hosting your email servers comes with a lot of administrative overhead like maintaining availability, reputation, certificates, quotas, DNS entries, DKIM, DMARC and SPF, etc. If you’re willing to go that route, then Mail-in-a-box is a good way to do it. There are some other options here that you can look at too - https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#communication---email---complete-solutions

If you happen to successfully run your own mail server, please do report back and tell us your experience.

Instead of hosting your own mail server, use a service like SimpleLogin. It allows you to configure custom domains on the paid plan and it simply redirects any email sent to an email alias to your actual inbox. So you never share your actual email address. Secondly, if tomorrow you change email providers, all you have to do is change the destination behind those aliases for the custom domains. It also does catch-all aliases so you can make them up on the fly.

Cryptpad is awesome. I second this. Bonus is that cryptpad encrypts your data too.

You could rclone mount (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_mount/) any configured remote to your machine. It is easier on a laptop/desktop OS and it’s better than nothing. For Android it is a bit harder but possible with Termux or the RSAF app from F-Droid.

My solution is surprisingly Microsoft OneDrive, but hear me out. I have the family plan that gives you 1TB per account and you can have up to 6 in the family, giving you a total of 6TB. The thing is, I don’t trust Microsoft, so I use rclone with a crypt remote that encrypts everything before it reaches OneDrive and the encryption key lives in the rclone config on my machine. Make multiple local copies of this file and you’re all set. You can replicate this with any storage provider and you don’t have to trust them.

No problem. I hope you found it useful. Anubis is not AI. It discerns between bots/AI scrapers and legitimate users using a combination of heuristics and a mathematical challenge, thereby protecting the website that sits behind it. Check out the documentation at: https://anubis.techaro.lol/

For auth providers, I’ve tried all the ones you named. Here’s my brief analysis:

• Authelia - deployment and configuration is moderately complex but documentation is great and it works well with Caddy reverse proxy.
• Authentik - way too complex to deploy and configure, requires you to understand their concepts very well. I’d stay away from it.
• PocketID - super easy to deploy and configure. Passkeys are easier and arguably more secure than passwords and it supports a few methods other than passkeys.

With these services you mentioned you want to or are already hosting, you could use the following in the order they are listed:

1. Basic auth using Caddy (reverse proxy layer)
2. Anubis to ward off bots and scrapers (between reverse proxy and hosted service)
3. PocketID for auth (before service as single sign-on)

I would recommend 2 and 3 as 1 is pretty useless against a determined attacker. Anything that’s on the public internet is bound to be attacked at some point, so follow best practices and perform server hardening on the host machine. Remember, you classify the sensitivity of the data you host and determine the severity of the risk if that data were to be exposed. So work with that in mind when choosing an option.

Firstly, what’s your threat model - as in what are you trying to block? For SSH access, fail2ban works. For bots and scrapers, I’m not sure how effective it is. What jails have your enabled/configured for fail2ban?

I don’t have your setup, but like someone else here said, I use Caddy on Docker as a reverse proxy for all my self-hosted services running in Docker containers. One really effective means of blocking AI scrapers and bots is Anubis - https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis. It might be worth a shot. It works for me.

Rclone with any cloud provider is another great option that’s seldom mentioned. I posted my setup as a comment on another post. You may find it here - https://programming.dev/comment/23849767