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.
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I haven’t seen others mention it yet, but for a while I also self-hosted 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.
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)
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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.
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 not too concerned, for example, if they have to check their spam folders
Then you can self host. I use stalwart but in your case I would probably use mox
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 use Brevo.com which gives a generous 300 emails per day limit on the free plan.
I will say that the web portal is a bit confusing but once you set it up you basically never need to go there again.
I’m using nullmailer, it’s as simple as it gets and has worked flawlessly for me for many years now:
If its internal network traffic only, you can just use stalwart and add the DNS records to your network so that stuff can use SMTP.
Otherwise, (also with stalwart or your preferred software), you will want to use an SMTP relay so that outgoing messages will be delivered without the hassle of getting your domain reputational enough for sent messages not getting junked by the big email providers.
I’m extra lazy and haven’t set this up, so I just have a public mail server that only receives messages because my outgoing SMTP port is blocked by my ISP.
Maybe it’s a bit off-topic, but for my transactional emails, I use Scaleway TEM’s free tier. 300 mails/month are included, if you go above, it’s 0.25€ per 1000 mails. Dirt cheap. Never have I gone above the free tier limit. And it saves me from the hassle to have to setup something to send emails on thr server itself. Note that I had strange behavior while I tried to validate my domain while I used CloudFlare’s nameservers.
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. 😁
