I'd really like to use the service and in fact I wish I'd been using it forever. But I want to do it right and self host it. It's just, maybe the most complicated thing I've ever seen.
Does it require self hosting your own email server as well? If you already own a domain, does that make the process easier?
is Anon Addy the only service like this? Also I'd love to integrate with bitwarden, so when I create a new account for some website, I can automatically create a new email address. (idk if there's any reason to do this, just think it could be cool)
To piggyback further, I've been wondering if having my own domain would help me get around my double nat issue not allowing me to make reverse proxies.
Thanks in advance to the community!
Edit:
I think I have a solution! Bitwarden actually has these integrations already and it's relatively new. duckduck go just doesn't work. I tried forwardemail and that site is filled with dark patterns so you think the free account is worth a damn until you're already invested time into setting it up. At the last minute it tells you you can't use it with bitwarden on the free account. The others are at least up front about their pricing. forwardemail.net doesn't even have a pricing page. Sending emails from the masked addresses is also paywalled. pretty much all functionality on forwardemail.net is paywalled, but they hide it from you the best they can, so fuck that company.
I spoke too soon. There's no option that isn't paid. So I guess back to self hosting anonaddy
Edit: I finally got duckduckgo email working with bitwarden integration. It now generates a random email for me automatically!
Edit edit: Found a good solution:
There are two solid solutions I think for this problem: Bitwarden + SimpleLogin integration. Ends up being about $40/year. The SimpleLogin integration is more limited as it just generates a generic hash. Pass gives you more flexibility - it adds the domain followed by a hash. It's cheaper by a few bucks if you pay per year.
or
Proton Pass ($48/year, or $36/year if paying for 2 years, or if you have proton unlimited ($8/mo), it's included What' nice is that the email address alias generator is built in and has a lot more options. It's cheaper if you pay for 2 years or already have proton unlimited. Both have stellar track records.
Glad it was helpful! I was worried I'd be a little off-topic talking about self-hosting e-mail instead of this Anon Addy thing. Hope you find a solution that works for you soon :).
And yeah... Unfortunately if you you're behind CGNAT and don't have a static IP I think doing this for free on your existing internet connection might be challenging. One thing that people in a similar position might be interested in is Hurricane Electric's free Tunnelbroker service, but I think you might still be out of luck behind CGNAT.
You'll be able to get public IPv6 addresses for free and can allocate them to your home network. You can set it up to dynamically update the IPv4 address on your end... But I think if you're behind CGNAT you can't do that, unfortunately. Another problem with this approach for something like a mail server is that not everything speaks IPv6... If a sender only supports IPv4 they won't be able to send mail to you.
I think behind CGNAT pretty much your only option is to pay somebody for a real IP somewhere. Either a VPS somewhere where you set up wireguard (there are cheap options for this, and then you can run other things on the machine), or a VPN with a dedicated IP.
I was considering a VPS! That said, if I'm say, accessing my jellyfin library externally through a VPS, wouldn't that just end up costing ludicrous amounts of money?
I don't use Arch btw ;)
Depends on your usage, but probably not? If you can transcode on your jellyfin server you'll be able to serve lower quality versions remotely if you want to save bandwidth... But most VPS's provide around a terabyte of bandwidth per month by default. If you use more it will cost more. I think it's usually fairly cheap to get more, but if you're the only one accessing it you're probably not going to use that much. Like if you rip a blu-ray you might end up streaming a 50gb or so file for a movie, but that's only a twentieth of the bandwidth allotted to you (roughly)... Plus if you reencode it to something smaller before putting it on your jellyfin server, or if your jellyfin server can transcode fast enough you can send a smaller video stream to your mobile devices or whatever.
I don't either, that article was just what I found that mentioned setting up Tunnelbroker with a dynamic IP.
Wow, that's incredible! I figured it would be much more expensive so I never really looked into it.
Well off the top do you have any reliable VPS recommendations? I think that would solve all the issues I have in regards to my double NAT. I have a synology 1621+ with a pretty weak CPU. And my whole library is in 4k, lots of remuxes as well. It may not be able to handle it lol. Poor thing. Even so, 1tb would be more than sufficient in 99% of circumstances.
May depend what you want and where (location can matter a little bit for latency critical stuff, but streaming video won't care), and what operating system you would run on it. The Hetzner ARM servers are pretty cheap for what you get (and it looks like they include 20TB of bandwidth). I've been pretty happy with Lunanode. I think people often look here for deals: https://lowendbox.com/ they often recommend Racknerd boxes... I think there's some affiliation with Racknerd and lowendbox.com, but I threw something on a Racknerd machine recently and have had a good experience so far. You may want to do some research if you want to send mail directly from these machines. Not everybody allows it (sometimes you just have to ask), and I hear tell that sometimes you can end up with an IP somebody spammed with before with a bad reputation.
I actually settled my email thing. I really just wanted an email masking/email aliasing service and proton pass has a really robust one built in. I believe it's SimpleLogin backed since Proton bought them recently. It's a great integration, now when I sign up for any website it genereates .@passmail.net or something like that. Turns out lots of the premier pw managers have integration with email masking now.
Thanks a million for all your advice! I think I have a solid way forward for my double nat issue. I have a solid basis for research on this now. You rock :)