An external email host. Life is too short to deal with frustrating email issues.
this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2025
53 points (100.0% liked)
Selfhosted
62850 readers
716 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:
-
Be civil.
-
No spam.
-
Posts are to be related to self-hosting.
-
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or readme if you're providing a link.
-
Submission headline should match the article title.
-
No trolling.
-
Promotion posts require active participation, with an account that is at least 30 days old. F/LOSS without a paywall has exceptions, with requirements. See the rules link for details. Tags [CBH] or [AIP] are required, see the links in Rule 8 for details.
-
AI-related discussions and AI-involved promotional posts have additional requirements for tagging, as noted in Rule 7 and the AI & Promotional Post Expanded Rules post, and find example disclosures here.
Resources:
- selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
- awesome-selfhosted software
- awesome-sysadmin resources
- Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
I’d recommend looking again, as I think that advice is becoming dated. Greylist and DKIM make spam prevention super simple, ironically because the centralization of email towards Outlook and gmail has trained pretty much every sender to follow the rules or your email doesn’t go through. And then Greylist catches the rest, because spammers don’t come back and retry after a few minutes.
The problem isn't incoming spam, but rather not being able to send to the larger email providers because of arbitrary spamfiltering on their side.
True. I kinda dodged that problem by having a personal .net domain that’s older than wikipedia.org. My understanding is that you can raise your domain’s reputation with some work.
Honestly the most important thing I use my domain for is easy-to-delete mailboxes and aliases to give to companies and contacts. That’s just incoming email.
For outgoing, there are services that let you send them an email and receive a report on any mistakes or misconfgurations they notice. I followed the first tutorial I found that didn’t seem like it was just advertising “see how hard email is? Looks impossible doesn’t it? Why not pay us instead.” Ended up being at linuxbabe dot com, run by Guoan Xiao, with part one titled “Build Your Own Email Server on Ubuntu: Basic Postfix Setup”. No links but search engines find it.
Big difference is I use OpenLDAP/slapd, and I put different components on different VMs. Took maybe a couple weeks of free time here and there, but I’m proud to say my outgoing emails seem to be accepted everywhere. Not that I send many, really.
Eventually planning on implementing filtering for terms and conditions updates for long-forgotten sign ups. I would like those to bounce.
Same :( admittedly I never tried, but it's the one thing everyone recommends against.
It is a real pain, I host a small email service, and spend at least an hour a day dealing with issues sending emails.Mainly because users think it is entirely acceptable to send thousands of emails a day thinking they will get results from it. However, I have to say that I am telling most people to move away from email as it isn't that secure and those free email addresses from old ISPs are terribly insecure. Also seeing a lot of data stolen as people think 2FA via email is great, so hackers just hack the email server and boom
I just use a domain name through name cheap, which includes ddns. I cant think of anything else that I do at home that isn't taken care of locally.
- Tailscale for external access, this is extremely convenient.
- Namesilo for domain (cheap but otherwise not really recommended)
- Bunny DNS (because NPM's certbot doesn't support Namesilo). Still looking at their other services, overall it seems nice.
Still looking at an external backup solution like Backblaze or Hetzner
For my homelab:
- Backblaze B2 (Backup storage)
- Cloudflare (DNS)
- Tailscale (VPN)
- Oracle Cloud (VPS)
For things that I host externally (i.e. not part of my homelab):
- Oracle Cloud (VPS)
- Tailscale (VPN)
- Cloudflare (DNS)
- Cloudflare R2 (Object storage)
- Backblaze B2 (Backup storage)
What are you paying for BackBlaze and Cloudflare?
I don't store much on backblaze, so I don't think I've ever spent over 2USD there in a month. As for Cloudflare, I'm able to stay in the free tier.
How much (GB/TB) is not much btw?
I need to get around to backing up via Backblaze
Around 350~400 GB. I compress and encrypt before sending to backblaze.
Email and offsite backups (as 3rd copy of data, encrypted
Fast Mail DNS because I moved my domain over there for email. Problem is that it doesn't have an API for DNS updates, and that makes it bad for DynDNS. There are some web scraping libraries out there that can work for it, but those can easily break any time FastMail changes their interface.
For now, I'm just using the fact that my IP doesn't change that often, and living with the fact that I'll have to manually update it at some point.
Plenty of better DNS services out there...
Uptime monitoring and notifications
Mind sharing what service you use for it? Paid or free?
A small application I wrote myself, hosted on the free tier of pythonanywhere.com
Basically just the bare minimum
- Email (Zoho, still on their old legacy free plan)
- Backblaze B2 for Restic to store backups on
- DNS for my public domain name (Cloudflare)
- Uptime monitoring for my website (HetrixTools)
hetrixtools is so good!
I have a $5/mo vps running caddy over wireguard to get better routing when I'm on mobile.
Otherwise, my traffic goes to my home ISPs hub 600 miles away and back. The VPS is less than 100 miles away and it performs much better.
For personal stuff, i use an external email, and borgbase for backups (highly recommend them if using Borg or restic).
GoDaddy(I think) for my domain, Cloudflare +Letsencrypt (DNS SSL challenge), Tailscale (to access applications remotely), AirVPN (for applications to access the web), Gmail (smtp, I want to migrate soon).
I host everything else.
- have a cloud server for public IP to host email server, headscale and coturn.
- hetrix tools for uptime monitoring
- cloudflare for ddos protection etc.
Cloudflare tunnels - it used to be dynamic dns, but the ISP blocked ports 80/443, so I switched to tunnels.
External DNS on the Gl-Inet router, included with the product
Goodcloud, from Gl-Inet (included and really nice to have another way to get to it)
for the home self-hosting, that's pretty much it.
For the (coming soon TM) fediverse apps in Keyboard Vagabond, add in S3, cloudflare CDN
regery for my domains (they're ukrainian)
smtp2go as a relay for my mail server
mxroute for my other mail domain (yes, I have 2 domains)
The rest I try to selfhost
- Mail with all the bells and whistles (been there, done that – but I just want this to work and not care about details).
- Dynamic DNS because I just need to tell someone my non-static IP so they can connect that with my domain name.
- Lets Encrypt...
- Backblaze (for now, until I find an alternative closer to home)
Only tailscale fpr vpn and backblaze for backup
For me Cloudflare as I've been with them for years, Let's Encrypt and that is pretty much it...
VPS that hosts my email and a few other things, and for clients that is where their stuff is hosted