© 2026 Gregory D. Weber
Activities leading up to 2024. Published March 20, 2026.
What I want to do, for the reasons given before, is host my own personal services: email, calendar, and contacts; in addition, though less personal, I will host my own web pages. What software will I use to accomplish this?
Here is the plan, with a flimsy bit of rationale.
I will use FreeBSD as the operating system, because Linux is increasingly falling under control of big info-tech companies like Ubuntu and IBM, and because Linux is getting weird with things like systemd. FreeBSD has a good reputation as a stable and secure UNIX-like operating system.
To operate email, web, calendar, and contacts services securely, I need a certificate. I will get it from Let’s Encrypt because I don’t want to pay money for it.
To get a certificate from Let’s Encrypt, I will need to either play tricks with a web server or play tricks with DNS. I don’t want to play tricks with DNS, so I will play tricks with the web server.
I choose Apache web server, simply because I have used it before and am somewhat familiar with it. I understand that the Apache httpd web server is less efficient than nginx, but I don’t expect a lot of traffic at my web site so that will not be a problem.
It will be a static web site because I do not want the inefficiencies and security risks of sites powered by PHP and the like.
Incidentally, I’m using Brave Browser because it blocks all of the Google’s tracking, and Facebook’s tracking, and other tracking. That means not seeing many ads, because most of the ads on the internet are providing by networks that track you.
I choose Postfix as my SMTP server because it has an excellent reputation for security. It may be overkill for what I need, but since I tend to suffer from analysis paralysis, I restrain myself from looking too much at the alternatives.
My plan is to download the email received onto my desktop computer at home, and not leave it on the server. (I don’t want to fill up the server’s storage.) I will also compose mail on the desktop, not on the server. To exchange mail between desktop and server, I will use Dovecot.
Now what about the Mail User Agent (MUA), i.e., the mail program I will use to read and compose mail? I was a longtime happy user of mutt until Indiana University (my employer before I retired) gave up using open protocols and hired Microsoft to handle their email. I will not use Windows or Microsoft Outlook, so I was forced to use Evolution. After a while the plugin for Evolution that enables it to communicate with Microsoft’s servers stopped being “free” ($0), so I began using Outlook Web Access / Outlook for the Web / Outlook Web App (OWA) for the university mail, but continued using Evolution for GMail. After a while longer I noticed that Evolution was losing mail. I would see a message in the inbox, and then it would disappear, sometimes before I could read it. That is totally unacceptable. So I switched to Thunderbird for my GMail accounts. I find both Evolution and Thunderbird clumsy, but GMail won’t let me use Mutt, at least not without going through hoops. (Or to be more exact, maybe, GMail frowns upon my using fetchmail to download the mail for mutt.)
Now for my own email server, I considered using mutt, but I liked GMail’s idea of tagging the mail messages instead of putting them in folders, so I looked for something that would do that. I considered notmuch and sup, but had trouble installing them. Eventually I settled on mu4e, which runs within Emacs. It uses a database to store the mail, and I thought it used tags (but later would find out it does not), and I’ve been a long-time happy Emacs user, and there is an integrated (but non-graphical) web browser (for viewing mail encoded in HTML).
On my Android tablet and phone I have been using Simple Calendar and Simple Contacts, from simplemobiletools.com, which work with DAVx5 to synchronize with a server using WebDAV. (I began using Simple Calendar and Contacts when the factory-installed apps on my Samsung phone went bonkers. I have them from F-droid, but they seem to be no longer accessible there, although DAVx5 is still on F-droid.)
Somewhere I found a list of calendar/contacts servers which mentioned Radicale. On the Radicale web site I found that it has been tested with DAVx5. Again resisting my inclination towards analysis paralysis, I decided to gave Radicale a try without considering further any of the other options.
One problem I foresee (or maybe I didn’t foresee) is that there are no desktop clients supported/tested except the likes of Thunderbird and Evolution, which I despise. Just mobile and web apps.
Next: Homelab or cloud?