I just setup a gmail account, just gotta turn on legacy smtp
Self-Hosted Main
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.
For Example
- Service: Dropbox - Alternative: Nextcloud
- Service: Google Reader - Alternative: Tiny Tiny RSS
- Service: Blogger - Alternative: WordPress
We welcome posts that include suggestions for good self-hosted alternatives to popular online services, how they are better, or how they give back control of your data. Also include hints and tips for less technical readers.
Useful Lists
- Awesome-Selfhosted List of Software
- Awesome-Sysadmin List of Software
This is the easiest way to do it.
I use mailgun. They give 1000 emails for free monthly which is plenty for me.
Started using Purelymail. Easy setup with my multiple domains. Really cheap.
Docker Mail Server
All you need is a static IP address, a DNS record, a PTR record, an SPF record, and a DKIM record. See, it's simple, right?
Send grid has no approval process and will give you 100/day for free
gmail with separate account than primary one
Guys, we are on r/selfhosted, and all the top replies are recommending cloud services? The actual fuck. I personally host my own postal server and it works great.
Postfix installed on the server itself. My apps don't send many emails, why go through the complication and cost of hosting email externally?
Mailtrap
AWS SES or Hetzner (where my mail id also hosted)
Gmail
Same, set up a separate email that I use exclusively for services. Did this as if the app password is hacked, they have access to an account with nothing but notifications.
Why isnt there a service that doesnt care what you do with your emails as long as you only sending max a few emails a day?
Because it would be overrun with phishing abuse in a matter of minutes?
Check if your ISP has an SMTP service. I use mine for alerting when stuff breaks and haven't had any issues. If you use your own domain name and have trouble with delivery, you could try setting up SPF.
Mailjet. Free for 6000 emails/mo, which for me is plenty to cover backup notification, monitoring system notifications, etc.
Sendgrid, Sparkpost, SES, plain gmail.
If you're only sending emails to yourself, gmail works well with no cost.
Strato
MailJet
I use Fastmail with a specific domain and/or aliases to separate it easily by rules as needed. But I do pay for Fastmail and only send emails to myself so may or may not be applicable to you.
I do the same. I like how each application gets its own password and only gets the permissions I want to give it (usually just smtp)
Sendgrid
Selfhosted Mailcow.
Nothing at all.
I selfhost ntfy and services that only support email for notifications send them to ntfy smtp, then ntfy turns them into a push notification.
I just checked the docs and didn't see anything about ntfy accepting smtp? This would be useful, what am I missing?
The SMTP relay that comes with my M365 tenant.
Sendgrid… you’d be well within the free tier.
Delegating mail to an external service means you're not self hosting it.
Sending email is something you can just do. There's no need for an external service unless:
- You're trying to deliver email to external users.
- You really need your email to get through without ending up in people's spam folder.
You're trying to deliver email to external users.
You really need your email to get through without ending up in people's spam folder.
So literally everyone actually using email.
G suite account supports inbound and outbound relaying.
PurelyMail
I used zoho. $16/yr for mail.mydomain and myname@mydomain set up. Use groups to set up different streams/mailboxes for all the things (gitlab@/cloud@/admin@/etc). It's super easy to point things at.
I have secondary gmail account just for that.
i personally found SendGrid easy to setup and cost effective
I use fastmail. Since I'm already paying for it as my normal email service, I started using it as my incomming and outgoing email provider for seldhosted apps. Works fine, no complaints.
Gmail
Interesting to not have seen PostMark mentioned
Seconding everyone suggesting to just use a Gmail account.
But to add to that, I created a small VM running Postfix that is an open relay that sends mail via that Gmail account. This way, I can use the Postfix VM as the SMTP server for all the other services and I don't have to remember and sprinkle that Gmail password all over the place.
Postfix's main.cf can be secured by configuring it to route all mail through that Gmail account, overwrite the 'from' address, and restrict the 'to' field to send only to myself and no other recipients. Then it doesn't matter what the 'from' of the various self-hosted services are, Postfix transforms the headers into something appropriate and sends it to Gmail to be delivered.
Dedicated Gmail account.
Mailrise + pushover
.test internal domain, own postfix SMTP+dovecot IMAP server.
The IMAP server is accessible from WAN via IMAPS (HAproxy+SSL/letsencrypt certificate).
As per securing against brute force attacks:
-
Dovecot has a listener process configured to talk the HAproxy's specific PROXY protocol which passes the original client IP to Dovecot, so the latter can apply its own authentication penalty algorithm
-
Crowdsec is installed with the HAproxy plugin, so client IPs can also be banned after authentication errors, albeit I'm not sure this works with HAproxy's PROXY protocol
I use duocircle.com, allows.dkim and spf. 1,000 per month for free. Gives a warning at 800 and 900 - helpful when I have a process run a little amok.