this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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Free or cheap 'Open' smtp relay options? (alien.top)
submitted 2 years ago by DingoFlaky7602@alien.top to c/main@selfhosted.forum
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Does anyone know of any free, or very cheap, smtp relays that are 'open' to any sender address and not domain limited?

My email setup (my domain & also local sports clubs emails) is behind a residential dynamic IP (virgin media in the UK) so need a relay to avoid getting spam tagged; I have tried without a relay and even with having correct spf, dkim, dmarc, etc. Records lots of items were still getting tagged as spam for dynamic IP.

The challenge i have from testing most of the big name free smtp relay services (smtp2go, mailjet, blogmail, mailgun, etc.) is that I have a mix of imap/pop3 accounts and some 'forward to x' accounts, the imap/pop accounts are all fine however the forward emails are getting blocked by the services I tested so far because the sender isn't from my listed domains. E.g. email1@gmail.com sends to email2@mydomain.com, my server then forwards the email to email3@outlook.com. The services I tested so far are blocking the forwarded email because email1@gmail.com isn't in my allowed list of sending domains.

The setup was working using virgins (ISP) relay until today but seems they're now limiting the sender address & have stopped even giving new email accounts to customers so not expecting any help from them so looking for options. (If the only real option is to stop the 'forward to X' I can live with telling the sports club that they can't have that anymore & all their emails will need to be imap/pop3)

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[–] kmaid@alien.top 1 points 2 years ago

I don't think email is something you can really selfhost. I would suggest getting a cheap mail provider like mxroute. I am using a dodgey reseller with success yuzhen.cloud. If you pay for icloud you can use a custom domain with them.

[–] h311m4n000@alien.top 1 points 2 years ago

I don't know of a free relay, but here's how I do it:

5€ hetzner VPS with Proxmox Mail Gateway installed, relays e-mail to my residential IP. To deal with my IP changing every now and then, I have 2 scripts:

  1. One at home updates my A record on cloudflare when an IP change is detected
  2. One on my PMG that checks for my A host on cloudflare and if the IP changes, modifies the conf files where the my residential IP is set then restarts postfix.

Been working great for 2 years now.