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
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I use smtp2go.com rather than deal with ptr records on my dynamic residential address
Ditto. Love this service.
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.
@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.
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 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.
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
[Thread #106 for this comm, first seen 19th Sep 2026, 02:10] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
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.
I can hardly blame Google for this. My spam to legit mail ratio is over 9000.
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.
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.
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 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.
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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.
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.
