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.
If they’ll go for it, the most reliable way will be to offer them extra email addresses on your mail server. Sometimes, when a mail provider decides they don’t trust an incoming email, they don’t mark it as spam or reject it and send a notification response. They just… Silently drop it without ever mentioning it to sender or recipient. The only genuinely reliable way I’ve heard to build and maintain the reputation to avoid that is to send way more mail than a few individuals can manage, even with your services sending notifications. Theoretically, you can do it with really low mail volume if you jump through a whole bunch of hoops, but nothing is really guaranteed long term.
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.
I just use my own protonmail. You can set up different accounts smtp providers for your different services
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.
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 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. 😁
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 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.