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. :(
You can use sendgrid to send your emails. That gets around the port 25 problem, but everyone is right - you’ll have a difficult time getting through spam filters even with them.
I selfhost my own email mainly so I don’t have to go through the Google unsecured apps rigamarole every time I want to set up smtp for one of my services, but no one except protonmail gets it reliably.