this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
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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
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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?

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[–] florian_7843@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Not what you asked for, but I started with self hosting my mail server ~ 1-2 years ago using mailu. Handles basically everything for me and I only needed to check my DNS entries + Reverse DNS.

Haven't really had any problems since then. Only thing I had to make sure to set SPF to strictest setting (I believe drop), etc.. that made the big ones MS and Google trust my mail instance without problems.

Only had a single mail rejected by Microsoft when I had my SPF set to junk instead of drop or something like that.

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

That's an interesting anecdote about setting SPF to drop. Thanks!

[–] ItchyWeight@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yeah, well, empirically, I had repeated issues with t-online and gmail recipients mostly. And I was never sure if it was my config, my IP (hosted on netcup), or something else, but it required constant attention. And that problem should really be gone with an smtp as a service (hopefully).

But maybe I'll have a look at mailu anyway...

[–] florian_7843@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

Check out mxtoolbox. Great website to check your mail server/ DNS etc.

[–] ProfessionalAd3026@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

T-Online sucks for many years already. They wouldn’t even follow standard back in the days.