by julienmarie on 12/4/23, 1:31 AM
I keep on hearing that hosting your own server is a pain. Email costs were always an issue for me. I manage a few e-commerce website. Initially when they were small I used MailChimp. Then moved to AWS SES. Now I moved to my own self hosted postalserver. My mailing lists are not huge ( 100k recipients) and I send daily and I don't have much of a deliverability issue. Depending on the audience my open rates are between 35 and 55%.
What I learned is:
- Make sure your configuration is perfect. From reverse dns to DKIM. Everything should be aligned.
- Have a clean email list. Validate emails ( MX, etc ), double optin, remove hard bounces, respect unsubscribes to the t ( people don't always unsubscribe using the link, but often just send an email to customer service, provide the option fornthe customer service team to unsubscribe people from marketing).
- Use a email warming service like mailreach. It seems weird but it makes a world of difference. It really works.
I spend less than $50/month all in all with a beefy instance on Hetzner Cloud. For the volume I send it would cost 6x this on SES.
by intsunny on 12/3/23, 9:36 PM
I'm amazed at how email server software is innovating and evolving like never before. We have new implementations of SMTP, IMAP, etc. We even have new protocols like JMAP thanks to the Fastmail guys.
But it also feels like fewer and fewer people are running their own mail servers. Everyone seems to just outsource it to Google or Microsoft. I'm also surprised at how many engineers barely understand how email works. (IE: I have to show them what email headers are and the useful info that can ne found there.)
by denysvitali on 12/3/23, 8:43 PM
I'm a huge fan of Chasquid. The HAProxy protocol support makes it easy to integrate in Kubernetes.
I uses to use this solution until a few months ago when I decided that self hosting my mail server was too much work. To be fair, it's not Chasquid's fault as operations there are basically 0, but more of a spam / email reputation thing.
by jsn on 12/3/23, 9:51 PM
Apparently there's no support for smarthost / relayhost (or I can't find any traces of it in the documentation). Running your own low traffic mail exchanger without it is often not a pleasant experience.
by MitPitt on 12/3/23, 10:06 PM
Does anyone know of an SMTP server which is easily usable with Caddy? I find tinkering with certificates quite bothersome, and I won't give up Caddy as I already host a bunch of apps with it.
by 8organicbits on 12/3/23, 11:06 PM
The hook functionality[1] looks easy to extend. I was looking for something that could trigger workflows for inbound email, anyone have (alternative) tool recommendations or experience?
[1] https://blitiri.com.ar/p/chasquid/hooks/
by zilti on 12/4/23, 6:27 PM
Why though? We already have OpenSMTP. It can't get any simpler.