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
You must log in or register to comment.
I use smtp2go.com rather than deal with ptr records on my dynamic residential address
I also use this service.
Ditto. Love 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.
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.
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.
Look into mailgun. They have a free tier.
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.
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 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’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.
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.
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.
