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.
What are you using for this type of thing? Hoping to have something not too complicated, and FOSS.
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 proxy!). 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)
Good answer! I get tired of the self hosted email FUD. Sure there’s more to it than “docker up” but it’s not that hard and it’s thoroughly documented at this point. So many tutorials.
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?