Selfhosted
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Do NOT self-host email! In the long run, you'll forget a security patch, someone breaches your server, blasts out spam and you'll end up on every blacklist imaginable with your domain and server.
Buy a domain, DON'T use GoDaddy, they are bastards. I'd suggest OVH for European domains or Cloudflare for international ones.
After you have your domain, register with "Microsoft 365" or "Google Workspace" (I'd avoid Google, they don't have a stable offering) or any other E-Mail-Provider that allows custom domains.
Follow their instructions on how to connect your domain to their service (a few MX and TXT records usually suffice) and you're done.
After that, you can spin up a VPS and try out new stuff and connect it also to your domain (A and CNAMR records).
That said, you can use a third party service only for sending, but receive mail on your self-hosted server.
That's what I'm doing. I have selfhosted E-Mail with YunoHost and send it through SMTP2Go.
I've been successfully using SES for a couple years now without issue.
Do you have more details on your setup?
I currently selfhost mailcow on a small VPS but I would like to move the receiving part to my homelab and only use a small VPS or service like SES for sending.
I set this up a couple years ago but I seem to remember AWS walking me through the initial setup.
First you'll need to configure your domain(s) in SES. It requires you to set some DNS records to verify ownership. You'll also need to configure your SPF record(s) to allow email to be sent through SES. They provide you with all of this information.
Next, you'll need to configure SES credentials or it won't accept mail from your servers. From a security standpoint, if you have multiple SMTP servers I would give each a unique set of credentials but you can get away with one for simplicity.
Finally you'll need to configure your MTA to relay through SES. If you use postfix here's a quick guide: https://medium.com/@cloudinit/sending-emails-with-postfix-and-amazon-ses-2341489a97e2
I've got postfix configured on each of my VPS servers, plus and internal relay, to relay all mail through SES. To the best of my knowledge it's worked fine. I haven't had issues with mail getting dropped or flagged as SPAM.
There is a cost, but with my email volumes (which are admittedly low) it costs me 2-3 cents a month.
They rejected me for using for personal notifications. I get being strict but good God let me use your service and if I abuse it shut me down.
What do you mean, "for personal notifications"? I have a bunch of alert notifications that route through SES back to me. Never had an issue.
SES requires a manual review by their support to be able to send external emails. I was requesting for access to send to my Gmail notifications (and friends technically) from my self hosted services. They rejected my request.
Weird. I don't remember my exact request but it was basically "send email on my personal domains" and they approved it.
Must have had a nice representative! Haha