this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
1 points (100.0% liked)

Self-Hosted Main

504 readers
1 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.

For Example

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

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
communick@selfhosted.forum
1
Forwarding incoming email with an smtp as a service relay (alien.top)
submitted 1 year ago by ItchyWeight@alien.top to c/main@selfhosted.forum
8 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

After having hosted my own postfix server, including SPF, DKIM and DMARC for years, I finally gave up since there were still fluctuating delivery issues for outgoing mail. So the plan is to use an an external service as relay for outgoing mail, handling generated transactional mails like user registrations and such. (there's still a postfix running on that box)

For now, I've chosen smtp2go which requires sender verification, which is fine for those transactional outgoing mails whose sender is always the same.

With my completely self-hosted setup, I forwarded incoming email to an info address on that domain to my gmail address (to avoid an additional inbox). But unfortunately, that doesn't work with smtp2go because the actual sender for a to be forwarded email is obviously someone who's not a verified sender from smtp2go's perspective and therefor bounces. I suspect other smtp providers might handle that the same way.

The only option I see now is to leave incoming mail on that server, install dovecot or something and setup my main google address to pull messages from that server - which is kind of awkward...

How do you guys deal with such a scenario?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] bz386@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I haven't tried it myself, but SRS (Sender Rewriting Scheme) might work for your use case. It is designed to route bounces back through a chain of email servers and is specifically supposed to solve your forwarding scenario. There's PostSRSd that can add this capability to Postfix.

Otherwise you really need a SMTP relay that is not focused on transactional emails, but I'm not aware of any free ones (for obvious reasons). Services like pobox.com or mxroute.com might be usable as SMTP relays, but they obviously have a cost, which might not be worth it.

I was in the same situation and eventually caved in and just routed all my personal email and domains to Fastmail, and only use smtp2go for transactional emails sent by my servers.

[–] ItchyWeight@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

Interesting, although I have to admit, this brings back memories of dealing with sendmail rewrite rules back in the 90s when I had to maintain a uucp based mailserver as an intern ;-) I’ll have look, thanks!

load more comments (1 replies)