this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2024
98 points (96.2% liked)

Selfhosted

39937 readers
347 users here now

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.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I have a unique name, think John Doe, and I'm hoping to create a unique and "professional" looking email account like johndoe@gmail.com or john@doe.com. Since my name is common, all reasonable permutations are taken. I was considering purchasing a domain with something unique, then making personal family email accounts for john@mydoe.com jane@mydoe.com etc.

Consider that I'm starting from scratch (I am). Is there a preferred domain registrar, are GoDaddy or NameCheap good enough? Are there prebuilt services I can just point my domain to or do I need to spin up a VPS and install my own services? Are there concerns tying my accounts to a service that might go under or are some "too big to fail"?

I can expand what hangs off the domain later, but for now I just need a way to make my own email addresses and use them with the relative ease of Gmail or others. Thanks in advance!!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] lily33@lemm.ee 11 points 10 months ago (2 children)

That said, you can use a third party service only for sending, but receive mail on your self-hosted server.

[–] Fisch@lemmy.ml 4 points 10 months ago

That's what I'm doing. I have selfhosted E-Mail with YunoHost and send it through SMTP2Go.

[–] SeeJayEmm@lemmy.procrastinati.org 4 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I've been successfully using SES for a couple years now without issue.

[–] domi@lemmy.secnd.me 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] SeeJayEmm@lemmy.procrastinati.org 3 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] seang96@spgrn.com 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] SeeJayEmm@lemmy.procrastinati.org 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] seang96@spgrn.com 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] SeeJayEmm@lemmy.procrastinati.org 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Weird. I don't remember my exact request but it was basically "send email on my personal domains" and they approved it.

[–] seang96@spgrn.com 1 points 9 months ago

Must have had a nice representative! Haha