Mxroute.com .

I use smtp2go.com rather than deal with ptr records on my dynamic residential address

I also use this service.

Ditto. Love this service.

My ISP offers unauthenticated SMTP for their customer addresses. It’s pretty heavily rate limited, but well enough for the occasional status email my system throws out. At least around here they are pretty common for residential customers, so that might be an option.

Other possibility is to set up SMTP relay to your network and give it credentials to an actual email account (with SMTP support, which isn’t granted these days). It can take in emails from your network without credentials and throw them to the internet with your account. It’s pretty simple to set up, search for postfix + smarthost. Added bonus is that you can read the replies to that address too via your email provider services.

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)

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.

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.

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

Some hosts block it by default, but if you ask, they’ll open it up no problem.

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 can hardly blame Google for this. My spam to legit mail ratio is over 9000.

Port 87 has a free tier

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?

Since proton does not support IMAP, you can only send it through the browser or their official clients

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. 😁

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.

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!

@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.

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.

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?

If you have local SMTP and IMAP you can send mail on your own systems, or if you’re not using containers and you run everything on the same system you may even be able to skip SMTP and just deliver directly. But if you want to receive mail from outside your LAN you’ll need a way to access your IMAP server.

Even if properly setup it could still go to spam until you get your reputation score up which with low volumes will take ages.

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.

I tend to just say fuck it and run a full KVM image

Could always use LXCs they’re lighter weight than a VM but they’re IMHO more complicated to get started with than Docker / Podman as there isn’t as big an ecosystem, unless you run a hypervisor that supports them. If you run a hypervisor then Proxmox and I think OpenStack are they only two I know that support them natively.

@Dultas @selfhosted @Theoriginalthon
You could install incus on almost every Linux system out there

Maybe one day I’ll get time to test Proxmox alternatives but I have a lot of playbooks I’d need to migrate if I went with something else.

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.

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.

I’m using nullmailer, it’s as simple as it gets and has worked flawlessly for me for many years now:

untroubled.org/nullmailer/

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 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

Then you can self host. I use stalwart but in your case I would probably use mox

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.

What are you using for this type of thing?

I just created a send-only mailbox in the account I already have at my hosting service and use this in all my services.

I’m not going to set up a mail server and deal with all the security issues and problems with private dial-up IP addresses myself. Been there, done that. Wasn’t fun.

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?

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)

i just use a email account from somewhere that supports email clients and set it up as a glorified mail client thats send only

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

[Thread #106 for this comm, first seen 19th Sep 2026, 02:10] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

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

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.

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 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.

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.

I run a small email host, so biased a little bit. For the app-notification half, don’t put it on a mailbox host at all: smtp2go or SES, the way people are already saying here, is the right shape, because your services want an authenticated relay and nothing else, and outbound 25 is blocked on most residential lines and a lot of VPS providers anyway. The part that genuinely needs mailboxes is the friends-and-family half, and it’s worth separating: one host for the humans on your domain, one relay for the machines, so a noreply@ reputation problem never lands on the addresses people actually read. If you want FOSS on both sides, maddy is the honest answer and someone above already gave it. If you decide the human half isn’t worth running yourself, I wrote up that tradeoff at franklymail.com/vs/self-hosting, with the caveat that we’re paid and not FOSS, and we deliberately don’t do app or bulk sending, so it only answers half your question.

I set up email on my phone while on a break in school without it being flagged as spam. I’m sure you can do it, it’s not too hard. Or you can use proton or similar service.