this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2024
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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.

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I use Mail-in-a-Box on a small VPS. Have been doing so for about 10 years. It takes care of basically everything.

Last year I subscribed to a small-time email provider, anydomain.net, because I got tired of playing whack-a-mole with services blocking my entire subnet due to spammers on the VPS. All told I probably spend ~US$20 per month to host it.