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.
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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 https:/)mailinabox.email/ and used it for what you described.
Mailcow is also a good all in one mail distro.
Look into mailgun. They have a free tier.
I use smtp2go.com rather than deal with ptr records on my dynamic residential address
Ditto. Love this service.
I also use this service.
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.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| DNS | Domain Name Service/System |
| IMAP | Internet Message Access Protocol for email |
| ISP | Internet Service Provider |
| LXC | Linux Containers |
| SMTP | Simple Mail Transfer Protocol |
| TLS | Transport Layer Security, supersedes SSL |
| VPS | Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) |
| k8s | Kubernetes container management package |
8 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 13 acronyms.
[Thread #106 for this comm, first seen 19th Sep 2026, 02:10] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
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)
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'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.
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
I've never run into it being blocked on a VPS or ded host provider. I wonder if this is a locale thing or if you've been unlucky enough to choose providers that attract enough abusers to require these policies.
Some hosts block it by default, but if you ask, they'll open it up no problem.
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.
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.
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.
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 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. 😁
@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.
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.
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
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.
Mxroute.com .
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.