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.
theres the SMTP sending/relay service, and then theres your management of the email domain.
for example, i use Amazon for my hosting services including SMTP. so when my instance emails outbound, its using amazon’s service as a relay for my domain. my domains are entirely run/manged through other services… mostly Proton.
so you’d setup a domain with email on an email provider somewhere, then set your instance to use that domain when sending outbound, which could require auth by your local hosting provider, or special provisions at your email service to accept the relayed email.
youre going to run into issues authorizing the relay needed to send outbound from your instance. amazon was a bitch