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. :(
This is completely standard for residential ISPs at least in the US. Your options are to either host this elsewhere or use a smarthost (somewhat of a proxy) for outbound mail.
Pointless. Your selfhosted e-mail will just end up in spam-filters anyway.
Sadly email federation is on its last breath and you are better off using an external service somewhere if you want your email to actually reach anyone.
Edit: it’s not much better on VPS you can rent either.
Edit: and in before the person that claims they have been self-hosting email for 20 years already… yes exactly! That is why yours still works.
Why is this? I know my dad has self-hosted an email server for about 15 years, and he only recently started having issues with his email going to spam. He was able to get it worked out, but he said it was annoying af, and he didn’t recommend getting into it now either. I think he had to talk to Google to get some special certificate or something.
@poVoq I only in the last year or so set-up an SMTP server for outbound only. DKIM, SPF and DMARC configured. I never have issues sending email anywhere.
They don’t bounce when the spam filter catches them. I have seen many people claiming they have no issues sending emails just for all their emails directly go to the spam-folder in my gmail account (that I reluctantly have). Maybe ask the people you are sending the emails to? Just because you don’t immediately notice the problem doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
You can use a VPN or proxy but it’s pretty much guaranteed that those IPs are already wildly abused and that your emails will go straight to spam.
At this point a VPS or cloud is indeed pretty much the best option and even then, you’ll need to let it age up for a while because AWS’s IPs are also wildly banned and give it some time to get unbanned and unban requests to go through.
You can use sendgrid to send your emails. That gets around the port 25 problem, but everyone is right - you’ll have a difficult time getting through spam filters even with them.
I selfhost my own email mainly so I don’t have to go through the Google unsecured apps rigamarole every time I want to set up smtp for one of my services, but no one except protonmail gets it reliably.
The major email providers will only handle email from know good and trusted IPs. If you’ve been hosting on the same IP for 15 years you’re trusted. If you started it last night your IP is still untrusted. It takes a long time to gain trust.
SendGrid has a good explanation here: https://sendgrid.com/resource/email-guide-ip-warm-up/
