So, I spent the last few days researching and then finally setting up mailcow. I got my domain name, my wildcard certificate, got all the containers up, disabled ipv6 (I don’t have it set up on my home router and am too lazy to set it up tbh), created a domain and an mailbox, etc.
Well, when testing it late last night, I found that I could receive mail but was getting timeouts when sending mail. After some googling, I found out that this will happen if port 25 is not open. Using traceroute, I found that port 25 traffic is not going outside my home network. And sure enough, I found on my ISP web site that I need to have a business account to unblock port 25, which costs twice what I am paying for internet now.
So what are my options? Is there any way around this? Do I need to host this elsewhere, such as AWS? Can I use a proxy or something that can translate it to a different port for me?
Edit: Yeah, so I just set up an alias to my existing email address. It isn’t what I wanted to do, but as many have pointed out, I’m fighting a losing battle here. :(
It’s possible but an archane mess of aspects to deal with. DMARK, DKIM, and SPF records are a pain to deal with.
That said, I have a pretty consistently working mailcow set up that doesn’t need 25 (most home ISPs do block that because of spam bots taking over granny’s computer) instead it uses 587 to relay messages through mailjet at no cost since it’s only a few a month. I used another similar marketing relay before too, they all work similar. It does have the drawback of the relay having access to outgoing mail, but incoming is straight to me and not like any other online mail service couldn’t just scan your entire mailbox at will.
Mostly used for internal system notices that dont leave local and signup valudations anyhow so there’s not much for them to gain from it.