I want to thank everyone who replied. I did some research on most of these and think PurelyMail is the winner for me. Feel free to correct me if I got some details wrong. I want to give a shoutout to @mbirth for mentioning Disroot, which looks like a really interesting experiment in federated services.

Also, I know this post is really bending the rules for c/selfhosted, but connecting your selfhosted services to an email provider is essential, and having a reliable and affordable email provider just makes this weird hobby of ours a little easier.

I’m liking what I’m seeing here! Most other services try to be like Google, where you can’t get a mail account without also paying for drive, calendar, office, etc. All I want here is an email service, and this looks good and cheap for that.

I’ll check him out, thanks!

That helps, thank you!

Thanks for the clarity! I’ll give this a shot when I get back home.

I feel like dancing! Wiped my SPI, installed the OPi Debian to my eMMC using dd commands, and I’m back in business.

I give it 1 week before I break it again trying to do something stupid.

For the uboot, I think I tried both of these: https://github.com/schneid-l/u-boot-orangepi5 https://github.com/orangepi-xunlong/u-boot-orangepi

I’m not sure what exactly changed, I used the same SD card, the same OPi image, used Balena Etcher to burn the image to the card… this time it booted into the live image from my SD! It’s a start!

Now I’m just trying to wipe my SPI of UEFI, reinstall uboot, then do a fresh install of Debian and try again with PXVirt.

Yeah, I was also starting to lean toward putting NextCloud on the OPi. There’s just not much happening on my OPi and I was only hesitating from trying that because I didn’t think the OPi could handle it, but it’s worth trying.

Thanks for the feedback!

1. I may not have labeled that accurately, I just plan to use Tailscale to access these services from specific authorized devices.
2. I meant “before I do something that is a pain to correct”. Like starting with the wrong OS or file system format.
3. My plan is to build a media server which will include 4k media, so I think my storage may need to grow over time… maybe TrueNAS is something I can add later if needed?
4. I guess the reason I was thinking of 2 separate machines is that I’ve heard using an OPi as a media server or NextCloud server will go really slow and potentially cause other issues. Plus I already have an old computer doing nothing right now, just needs new SSDs.

Used the whiteboard tool in Clickup. It’s a lot like FigJam.