So, I’m trying to set up a self-hosted mastodon instance, and of course this requires an email service. Self hosting one is not an option, because of anti-spam stuff, or so everyone says. The recommendations are to use services like mailgun or postmark, but there’s one thing I don’t really understand:

All these services require verification of an email to be able to send from it. For example, if I want to use noreply[at]mydomain.com with mailgun, I need to click a link sent to that address, which to me feels like a catch-22. How can I receive that email if I don’t have the email service set up yet? Do I have to set the domain up with some private email service (protonmail, tuta…) first?

Any help is appreciated, I’m pretty new at this.

Edit: Alright, so it seems that Mailgun actually doesn’t require this weird confirmation email, just dns records. The first one I tried, SendPulse, did. Postmark requires an email from the domain at signup. Hope someone else can learn from this.

  • h3ndrik@feddit.de
    1·
    9 months ago

    There are a few all-in-one solutions out there that make selfhosting Email easier. “Mailcow” for example if you’re using docker.

    Maybe your provider also offers you mail.

    I think you can also register an external mail service. For example register an email address with gmail.com and set SMTP_SERVER SMTP_LOGIN and SMTP_PASSWORD etc accordingly. You then need to set SMTP_FROM_ADDRESS to the gmail address. I dont think it’ll work with noreply@mydomain.com if you’re doing it like that.