I’m planning the transition to self-hosted mail. I did fully self-host mail >10 years ago, so I know how to do it in essence, but I’d like to go a bit softer now, and not host outbound myself, it’s just too annoying.
What’s your take on that? Do you self-host SMTP as well? Why or why not?
If not, what providers do you use for it (especially in Europe, or even Germany)? How reliable are they? What’s the maximum attachment size? What do you pay for it?
Not sure, why you want to host email yourself. If it is just for privacy reasons, you could also have a look into posteo.de (I am customer for years, no ads, nearly zero spam, you can even pay with cash if your like) or mailbox.org. German providers and especially posteo is really tracking a minimum amount of data, just as much as they are required by law.
I want to host mail storage myself, mainly.
Posteo, for example, is extremely expensive there. At 0.25 EUR per GB per month that would easily be a three-figure charge per month.
I do have the infrastructure for backing up the data on the server, but archiving email outside of IMAP and managing my data not exceeding 20 GB or something is not what I want. My mail accounts can be hundreds of gigs and that is fine.
My question is mostly about SMTP, which I do not want to do myself.
Amazon SES is a virtually zero-cost solution for SMTP. You can set up a smart relay on your mail server or simply have users plug in the SES SMTP.
The Exim mail server used in the free Hestia control panel also allows for using local SMTP or relayed SMTP on a per-dimain basis.