So, I spent the last few days researching and then finally setting up mailcow. I got my domain name, my wildcard certificate, got all the containers up, disabled ipv6 (I don’t have it set up on my home router and am too lazy to set it up tbh), created a domain and an mailbox, etc.
Well, when testing it late last night, I found that I could receive mail but was getting timeouts when sending mail. After some googling, I found out that this will happen if port 25 is not open. Using traceroute, I found that port 25 traffic is not going outside my home network. And sure enough, I found on my ISP web site that I need to have a business account to unblock port 25, which costs twice what I am paying for internet now.
So what are my options? Is there any way around this? Do I need to host this elsewhere, such as AWS? Can I use a proxy or something that can translate it to a different port for me?
Edit: Yeah, so I just set up an alias to my existing email address. It isn’t what I wanted to do, but as many have pointed out, I’m fighting a losing battle here. :(
I’ll be repeating what’s said already but coming from someone who hosts his own non critical email
VPS Either with a TCP reverse proxy back home comming in on an other port (seems most compatible with mailcow at home)
Or hosting postfix on the vps, you could still do IMAP at home
It’s possible but an archane mess of aspects to deal with. DMARK, DKIM, and SPF records are a pain to deal with.
That said, I have a pretty consistently working mailcow set up that doesn’t need 25 (most home ISPs do block that because of spam bots taking over granny’s computer) instead it uses 587 to relay messages through mailjet at no cost since it’s only a few a month. I used another similar marketing relay before too, they all work similar. It does have the drawback of the relay having access to outgoing mail, but incoming is straight to me and not like any other online mail service couldn’t just scan your entire mailbox at will.
Mostly used for internal system notices that dont leave local and signup valudations anyhow so there’s not much for them to gain from it.
I can agree with everyone here, self hosting mail at this point is pointless. You are going to spend so much of your time reaching out to be pulled off of blacklists only to be added right back onto another. It’s a vicious cycle unfortunately, and than just wait until you get added to Barracudas or Proofpoints naughty list… you may as well start over at that point.
And sure enough, I found on my ISP web site that I need to have a business account to unblock port 25
This is very common, unfortunate you didn’t realize it until now. The easiest solution to that is to upgrade your internet service to business class with static IP. But like the others said this may be futile being that all the major email providers are going to mark emails from your domain as spam (& in some cases null route those incoming emails), it takes a long time for all the major email providers to trust you.
