This is not my area but why dont people setup their own smtp servers, and use plain tools like readcube?
Sadly, Google will flag as spam most new email servers by default. Email deliverability is a cartel these days.
Show HN: A self-hosted email engine
11–20 of 63 posts
Re: Show HN: A self-hosted email engine
#12This is not my area but why dont people setup their own smtp servers, and use plain tools like readcube?
Hosting your own email service is way more difficult than just spinning up a smtp server and some interface. Most big providers (like gmail) are more likely to flag incoming mails from unknown servers. That's the reason why stuff like Sendy[1] is so popular. You host your own interface, settings and so on, but the ugly part of sending your email is handled by AWS SES. [1] https://sendy.co/
That's only true if you're spamming people a lot. Running your own postfix server is trivial, and you'll have a fine reputation so long as you aren't sending marketing BS.
Re: Show HN: A self-hosted email engine
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hosting your own email service is way more difficult than just spinning up a smtp server and some interface. Most big providers (like gmail) are more likely to flag incoming mails from unknown servers. That's the reason why stuff like Sendy[1] is so popular. You host your own interface, settings and so on, but the ugly part of sending your email is handled by AWS SES. [1] https://sendy.co/
That's only true if you're spamming people a lot. Running your own postfix server is trivial, and you'll have a fine reputation so long as you aren't sending marketing BS.
Kinda two use cases here with my being more on the business side than personal, that's true. You may be right for small personal scenarios.
Re: Show HN: A self-hosted email engine
#14Just curious, which JS framework are you using for the front-end?
Re: Show HN: A self-hosted email engine
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hosting your own email service is way more difficult than just spinning up a smtp server and some interface. Most big providers (like gmail) are more likely to flag incoming mails from unknown servers. That's the reason why stuff like Sendy[1] is so popular. You host your own interface, settings and so on, but the ugly part of sending your email is handled by AWS SES. [1] https://sendy.co/
That's only true if you're spamming people a lot. Running your own postfix server is trivial, and you'll have a fine reputation so long as you aren't sending marketing BS.
Running own SMTP server for personal use is hard. Google is the worst adversary just because of their market share.
I have a mail server for personal use, and I send less than 10 mails per day for many years. DKIM, SPF, DMARC are all properly set up. I am signed up to all possible postmaster tools, including that of Google.
Still, Google started blocking mail sent from my IPv6 address in December. I switched to IPv4, and it fixed the issues for existing gmail recipients, but new recipients usually see my mail in Spam. When I don't get a reply for a few days, I mail them from my backup @gmail.com account and ask to unmark me as spam and add to contacts. So far, this helps.
P.S. I also run a community website on a different domain and IP. It sends tens of thousands of notification emails per month, and it fares better in Google Postmaster Tools. User-reported spam is within 1% and it seems that this is acceptable behaviour for Google.
Re: Show HN: A self-hosted email engine
#16Thanks for making your website perfectly readable without JS enabled! A rare occurrence nowadays.
Re: Show HN: A self-hosted email engine
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's only true if you're spamming people a lot. Running your own postfix server is trivial, and you'll have a fine reputation so long as you aren't sending marketing BS.
Running own SMTP server for personal use is hard . Google is the worst adversary just because of their market share. I have a mail server for personal use, and I send less than 10 mails per day for many years. DKIM, SPF, DMARC are all properly set up. I am signed up to all possible postmaster tools, including that of Google. Still, Google started blocking mail sent from my IPv6 address in December. I switched to IPv4…
My current impression is that Gmail is sort of broken in general. There isn't really anything you can do to insure that an email will get delivered to Gmail with 100% certainty.
Presumably people who actually care would not be on a free email service in the first place...
Re: Show HN: A self-hosted email engine
#18Awesome. We can never have enough of high quality self hosted software.
As someone who has been out of the PHP game for a long time, is it still a viable choice for new software? I don't have fond memories of the language at that time, so seeing PHP in the demo video poster frame was an immediate mark against pitching this at my company. That made me wonder whether it's a reasonable reaction to have. Edit for the downvoters— this is an honest question and I very much agree that we can ne…
PHP is a very good choice. If you want to refresh your knowledge of PHP take a look here: https://phptherightway.com/
It's fast. PHP has great documentation. PHP ecosystem is now based around Composer, in comparison to mess of package management in JavaScript and Python, Composer is just wonderful to use. Packagist has ton of libraries. Share nothing architecture is very easy to maintain and scale. You can do strict typing. There are static code analysis libraries like Psalm and PHPStan if you want features normally offered by compilers. It's easy to hire devs. There are two wonderful frameworks that moder PHP is centered around: Laravel and Symfony. There is also community body issuing standards to ease framework interoperability: https://www.php-fig.org/psr/
The app seems to be written in Laravel, so you can take a look here if it's your coup of tea: https://laravel.com/
Having said that, Wordpress and other old code bases are still a mess. But stable mess, and business like stable :) .
Re: Show HN: A self-hosted email engine
#19I think this is a more modern alternative to Sendy (https://sendy.co/) which is a little cheaper. (no affiliation except being a user)
Sendy does look like it has more features though - and it has been around for far longer, corner cases debugged and all. I’d love to hear how this is any different from Sendy.
Re: Show HN: A self-hosted email engine
#20This is not my area but why dont people setup their own smtp servers, and use plain tools like readcube?
One reason is that the services are actually quite cheap if you are running a real business. Likely better to spend time on your core thing instead of tinkering with mail server.