After self hosting my mail server at home on a Raspberry Pi, I frequently encountered internet stability issues. Sometimes, my fiber connection would get damaged due to nearby construction work, and other times, my ISP would schedule maintenance, causing outages that lasted for an hour or more.

These incidents made me realize that hosting my email server at home was risky, I could lose important emails if my internet went down. As a result, I started looking for alternative options like Mailfence, Mailbox and Fastmail. However, these services either offered only a free trial or limited storage (around 1GB), whereas I wanted a affordable and simple mail service with a decent amount of storage. And by default, domain registrars do not provide email services. If they do, it is usually a paid feature.

After researching online, I discovered Zoho, which turned out to be the perfect solution. They offer a free email service for a single user with 5GB of storage, which is more than enough for me. Additionally, their paid plans are affordable, making them a great choice for small businesses. Zoho also provides a secure and robust platform.

I decided to shut down my mail server on the Raspberry Pi and switch to Zoho. Their platform offers a clean and user friendly interface, making it easy to set up a domain for email. You can add up to four users to your domain and create email addresses for them, making it convenient to set up accounts for family members like your siblings or parents. Additionally, Zoho provides a chat based solution called Cliq, similar to Microsoft Teams and Slack.