Basically, I’d like to have my own domain e.g onlinepersona@mydomain.com but not go through the hassle of hosting my own email service: I’d like to use another service that handled SPF, DMARC, and whatever else for me, grab the emails from their service using POP, and make it available to my email client on android and Linux using IMAP. SMTP will be through the third party.
This way, if the third party starts doing some bullshit like trying to lock me in, donating to a dickhead, or whatever else I disagree with, I can cancel my subscription, move to another third party, and keep all mails on my server.
How can I achieve this? Which search terms should I be using? “Self host email server” brings up stuff that’s the equivalent of self-hosting gmail, AOL, posteo, kollabnow, or whatever, but that’s not what I want. “Selfhost POP relay” doesn’t have much better results, always bringing up SMTP relay…
You can run a dovecot (or any IMAP server) where ever you want and use fetchmail to pull data from POP-server into it. There’s plenty of discussion and instructions around the web so I won’t copy’n’paste them here, search for ‘fetchmail dovecot’ or something similar.
Seconding fetchmail. It’s configuration is quite elaborate for a whole bunch of situations. I’ve used it in a small office situation to pull email from their legacy ISP’s POP into an internal IMAP server, so they could have multiple clients sharing mailboxes. (And so they couldn’t set weak passwords on an internet-connected system :-/ )