Comment by wrldos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wrldos | Hacker News Reader

Honestly I've tried all of the VPS services and they're problematic. They are barrel scraping companies generally and some services literally block their entire networks. And occasionally their data centres catch fire. And of course the moment you get a minor billing issue you find all your VMs also catch fire. Also with any VPS, don't expect to be able to send emails from it. That's not going to happen even if you manage to beg enough for them to let you send them because no one will listen to SMTP from a VPS.

If I was going to go with anyone I would use AWS. Their stuff works better than any other company I've found and also support is actually existent. But expect to pay for it.

I don't want to pay for it so I keep my DNS and static web content on S3/CloudFront/R53 and let Apple handle the cloudy shit like email, calendars etc. Both AWS and iCloud+ cost me about £4 a month in total.

Someone will own you in one way or another. Better to leverage that and have an exit plan than not leverage it and cost yourself time, money and sanity because that's the real outcome of what you want to do.

You can use services like mailgun to send an email, so it's not a strict requirement

You can but that multiplies complexity somewhat. I have spent 25 years dealing with outbound email from various things from country level ISPs down to small web apps and the only way to not die inside a little is to send via one of the larger providers (O365/Google/iCloud/Yahoo/AWS SES etc).

I had to even dump Fastmail because they had delivery issues with Yahoo.

I don't agree, mailgun provides simple API and there are many similar services. Even if the desire is to use Google or O365, it's possible to do so, including AWS SES.

Overall, it seems to be a minimal cost.

On top of that, this is talking about self-hosting, for which the delivery is not a concern at all, the target of the emails is "yourself" (can add filters to avoid things reported to spam)

SMTP is the only API that should be considered.

I didn't imply HTTP API, I said "API" on purpose: they provide an SMTP API for bulk sending (an smtp relay), simple smtp sending and a nice curl command that can be used in simple scripts.

If that is not enough, Nylas is an option.

I just find extreme limiting your hosting options for email sending, especially when you can still host wherever you want and use email services from other providers.

In case of self hosting, the clients are also limited (usually yourself, family and friends), so you can even ask to "allow list" the address you plan to use for those communications.

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