Several of my self hosted services need to be able to send minor occasional emails for things like changing passwords or other notifications.
I’ve never been interested in the hassle of self-hosting my personal email, since I’ve heard about it being difficult. But for my little local services to have one admin@ or noreply@ to send from, with just a small handful of friends and family as users, maybe it’s simpler than a full personal email replacement would be? I’m not too concerned, for example, if they have to check their spam folders. As long as the email still lands. And probably wouldn’t need to worry about incoming emails.
What are you using for this type of thing? Hoping to have something not too complicated, and FOSS.
Edit: I also would like it to come from ____@mydomain.com
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I haven’t seen others mention it yet, but for a while I also self-hosted https:/)mailinabox.email/ and used it for what you described.
Mailcow is also a good all in one mail distro.
Postfix, but even with full spf dkim etc. monty not guaranteed to be always delivered to Gmail and Outlook. Because these don’t give a shit about standards.
I picked zoho.com free tier, with an eu.org domain after scanning through a set of different options. No marketing appended to emails and only throttles on excessive sending instead of hard limits. Each service sends from its own address.
purelymail.com was my backup paid option if the free plans were no good, with the advanced pricing and low usage the cost would be miniscule.
Look into mailgun. They have a free tier.
I just use my own protonmail. You can set up different accounts smtp providers for your different services
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System IMAP Internet Message Access Protocol for email ISP Internet Service Provider SMTP Simple Mail Transfer Protocol TLS Transport Layer Security, supersedes SSL VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) k8s Kubernetes container management package
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i just use a email account from somewhere that supports email clients and set it up as a glorified mail client thats send only
Postfix + Amazon SES free tier
I have every one of my selfhosted domains, apps and even list monk sending mail (tho I don’t have an actual newsletter yet)
My domain registrar hosts my email too, so I set up a mailbox for self-hosted services to send emails from. Is this an option for you? For me I figured it would be a lot easier than setting up a mailserver myself and doing the research you’re now doing.
I use smtp2go.com rather than deal with ptr records on my dynamic residential address
I also use this service.
For inbound, I use Postfix + rspamd + dovecot directly to my server. Outbound, I used to send it directly from my server. I did this 15+ years with DKIM, DMARC, and SPF. It worked well for like 95% of the emails I sent, but I started relaying through smtp2go.com after I had just a couple really important emails not get delivered or me not be sure if the recipient saw them.
I’m hosting Mailcow in a cheap VPS, for both personal/family and system emails. Not something I’d necessarily recommend (it’s overkill for your requirements anyway), but the initial setup and maintenance are not nearly as difficult as people will try to make you believe. Before that I just used Gmail. You can point your sending application to
smtp.gmail.com, STARTLS on port 587 or SSL on port 465, username is your email address, and a Gmail app password you create beforehand.I’m not too concerned, for example, if they have to check their spam folders. As long as the email still lands.
In that case, it really isn’t that much of a hassle. A basic mail system isn’t that complicated to set up (just make sure you have proper authentication and such, don’t host an open relay!). I actually did this not too long ago, using maddy, which unlike the traditional postfix+dovecot setup (which I had also been looking into) means you don’t even have to host separate services for SMTP and IMAP, and it also automates most additional things that are necessary nowadays for you, like TLS, DKIM, DMARC, and so on. Not quite everything though, there’s still stuff needed to do manually, mostly to set the SPF and DMARC records in the DNS, but it’s been working really well so far.
And really, the only mail provider you have to worry about for putting your mails into spam is gmail. They’re the worst. (maybe microsoft-hosted outlook too, but I haven’t encountered anyone using that)
I can hardly blame Google for this. My spam to legit mail ratio is over 9000.
The big problem you’ll run into is that it’s very likely outgoing connections to port 25 is blocked. In my experience it’s very uncommon that residential ISPs allow it, and even most VPS providers will block it unless you request access. So you’ll most likely need some form of relay anyway, and at that point you may as well send directly to the relay.
Port 25 being blocked on residential connections is still a thing, but it’s much less of a thing than it used to be.
I’ve never had an issue just using the submission port when the default smtp port was blocked :D
I’ve never run into it being blocked on a VPS or ded host provider. I wonder if this is a locale thing or if you’ve been unlucky enough to choose providers that attract enough abusers to require these policies.
On residential connections, that’s probably the case, yes. I’m hosting it on a VPS though and have had no problems with blocked ports so far. I imagine it depends on the provider?
To be honest I haven’t done that deep search into how common it is for VPS providers to block port 25, but in the cases it has been relevant for me it has required at least raising a request and for instance for Hetzner being a customer for at least one month. I’ve figured that it’s a good thing and if a VPS provider has no restrictions at all their IP ranges are much more likely to have bad reputation and blocklist issues.
Good answer! I get tired of the self hosted email FUD. Sure there’s more to it than “docker up” (Maddy is close though) but it’s not that hard and it’s thoroughly documented at this point. So many tutorials.
I verified my domain with Proton and I can send mails from my domain through their servers and pass all sender verification and reputation tests. This works without needing to control a public IP in a range that is allowed to send mail to the common mail services.
Hello,
Can you detail how you’re sending the emails? Where you have to configure the Proton credentials?
It’s somewhere in the settings on the web interface, you can set up SMTP credentials for any of the email addresses you’ve set up in Proton there. Maybe you’ll find it on your own already, but I could look it up exactly once I’m on the PC later
here:
Yup that’s it, you were quicker than me, thanks!
Since proton does not support IMAP, you can only send it through the browser or their official clients
That’s wrong, you can set up sending via SMTP pretty easily. And they also have an IMAP bridge app to access your mailbox through other clients like Thunderbird.
There also the Proton Bridge which could be an option, but haven’t used is myself. That’s why I am curios on the setup. 😁
@crandall selfhosting an email server is far from being a hassle. Nowadays it is really easy. You can setup everything in less an hour.
I use stalwart + a postfix relay on a cheap vps.Ah yes. Fuck with dns, reverse dns/ptr records, dmarc, dkim, spf, verify server is not on a blacklisted ip in spamhaus, stand up a server, then implement anti spam filters, and hope anything you send doesn’t end up in someone else’s spam filters, as well as monthly checks to make sure no spam lists have sudddenly added your domain/ip to said lists.
But hey easy right?
Actually yes, if you take each piece one step at a time it’s not that bad, as long as you are not expecting a fully functioning mail server on day 1 it’s relatively easy.
Yeah, this is self hosting after all. If you don’t expect some challenges to work though then you’re not gonna not have a good time.
The crazy thing is I can do a mail server easily, but I always get stuck or annoyed with docker, everyone says docker is easy 🤷
Yeah that’s going to depend a lot on the images you’re running. If it’s a published one the likely it’ll have a compose or at least a one liner to get it running. But yeah there can always be issues with hard coded IDs and if you want to give the host folders 777 or limit them. Are you running selinux and that’s going to get in the way. Did they not mention capabilities that needed to be added?
And if you’re building your own or extending that a whole other ball of wax.
And I typically run on k8s so that adds a whole other layer of complexity. But I’ve been using it for years and I’m actually more comfortable with it than just docker or podman.
It is kind of a hassle to get all your DNS set up so your mail doesn’t go to spam. If you don’t already know what you’re doing it will probably take over an hour.
Even if properly setup it could still go to spam until you get your reputation score up which with low volumes will take ages.
So i was thinking about this from a dns perspetive. If you have a dns forwarder can you not configure it to ensure that emails from the local smtp server never leave tour lan?
