SeeJayEmm

SeeJayEmm , 5 months ago to Selfhosted in Self-hosted or personal email solutions?

I get told by web forms regularly that my email is not a valid address and even people that got my email written on a piece of paper have replaced the .email with .gmail.com cause “that couldn’t be right”…

That's the thing that holds me back from a non-standard TLD, as much as I'd love to get a vanity domain.

I've got a .org I've had for over 20 years now. My primary email address has been on that domain for almost as long. While I don't have problems with web-based forms, telling people my email address is a chore at best since it's not gmail, outlook, yahoo, etc...

SeeJayEmm , 5 months ago to Selfhosted in Self-hosted or personal email solutions?

I set this up a couple years ago but I seem to remember AWS walking me through the initial setup.

First you'll need to configure your domain(s) in SES. It requires you to set some DNS records to verify ownership. You'll also need to configure your SPF record(s) to allow email to be sent through SES. They provide you with all of this information.

Next, you'll need to configure SES credentials or it won't accept mail from your servers. From a security standpoint, if you have multiple SMTP servers I would give each a unique set of credentials but you can get away with one for simplicity.

Finally you'll need to configure your MTA to relay through SES. If you use postfix here's a quick guide:
https://medium.com/@cloudinit/sending-emails-with-postfix-and-amazon-ses-2341489a97e2

I've got postfix configured on each of my VPS servers, plus and internal relay, to relay all mail through SES. To the best of my knowledge it's worked fine. I haven't had issues with mail getting dropped or flagged as SPAM.

There is a cost, but with my email volumes (which are admittedly low) it costs me 2-3 cents a month.

SeeJayEmm , 5 months ago to Selfhosted in Self-hosted or personal email solutions?

I've been successfully using SES for a couple years now without issue.

SeeJayEmm , 5 months ago to Selfhosted in Self-hosted or personal email solutions?

@avguser

I'll second not self hosting email unless you're in it for the experience.

I'd also strongly caution against hosting email for friends and family unless you want to own that relationship for the rest of your life.

If you do it anyway, you're going to end up locked into whatever solution you decide for a long time, because now you have users who rely on that solution.

If you still go forward, don't use Google (or msft). Use a dedicated email service. Having your personal domain tied to those services just further complicates the lock in.

(I did this over a decade ago, with Google, when it was just free vanity domain hosting. I've been trying for years to get my users migrated to Gmail accounts.)

If I had it all to do over again. I'd probably setup accounts as vanity forwards to a "real" account for people who wanted them. That's easy to maintain, move around, and you're not dealing with migrating peoples oauth to everything when you want to move or stop paying for it.

SeeJayEmm , 6 months ago to Fediverse in The Internet Is About To Get Weird Again - Rolling Stone article

Remember sites like stumble-upon? I want the Internet that enabled THAT back.