mailpace-rails VS mailcatcher

I run a small transactional email provider (https://mailpace.com), our IPs are very rarely added to blocklists- but we are very strict on what we allow through our service, and surprisingly we’ve had no long term delivery issues with any of the big providers.

So thanks to the federated/decentralized design of email, is totally possible to be part of the network without any special privileges.

We are sending millions of emails every day though, which is quite different to sending a couple hundred personal emails a week. If you’re running this on a cloud host, expect to be blocked by default. However if you can find a small vps provider you’ll have better luck on sending yourself.

If you’re going to learn anything, email is a good bet. It’s barely changed in 30 years, and I suspect it will not change much for a long time.

I built my own transactional email provider (https://mailpace.com), I wish I had found this link before I started.

I would also recommend reading the email RFCs, they’re not that difficult to understand and the history explains a lot. Email aside we can learn a lot from this kind of distributed, decentralised system design in the future.

Their website at https://mailpace.com/ says that it's only intended for transactional mails however

Give MailPace a try [0]. The creator seems like a great guy, and the service does what it says without any bs. I've been using it for a while now for side projects, and can only recommmend it.

0: https://mailpace.com/

I agree that this is a challenge! If you want to use the hosted version, it's impossible to avoid the need for that trust. I'm working on making self-hosting easier for this reason.

Some other services (like Firefox Relay) will use AWS' Simple Email Service for everything. I opted to go for [MailPace](https://mailpace.com/), an independent, privacy-focused provider instead, which is an improvement but still not ideal. I believe that SimpleLogin lets you self-host your email, which is best from a privacy perspective, but I'm slightly concerned about the UX of having to think about email deliverability. Still experimenting with that!

You could use an SMTP relay service and not worry about deliverability while still self hosting your email. I don't self host email anyway but for other things I use https://mailpace.com/ - it's has probably the best pricing in the market and works very well. Emails are delivered very quickly.

When I was launching my new website, I was looking for an email provider. That's when I came across OhMySMTP, a simple and privacy-friendly transactional email service. My web framework of choice, Laravel, unfortunately doesn't support OhMySMTP by default. Luckily, OhMySMTP does provide a swiftmailer transport plugin! This can be installed in any Laravel project, and can be configured like official transports.

If you own the server, it might be easier to set up a little smtp client. Or to be more security conscious, a incoming only smtp client like https://github.com/0xERR0R/mailcatcher/ and collapse that dataflow. But pubsub has a monstrous free tier anyway and I also wanted to keep a copy of the emails on gmail which is easier to search

There are lots of ways to do this. Postfix is nice but a little heavy. The simplest and most functional way I've found is https://github.com/0xERR0R/mailcatcher since all it does is forward the emails. You can even use a throwaway gmail SMTP so it doesn't get send to spam

Easy to set up on a rpi/cheap VPS, as long as you have a hostname. And while you're there, look for a short domain name so it's fast to type (on credit card kiosks). You can get cheap short non-standard TLD's like .li. I got a 3 character domain for $5 a year, as short as bit.ly, but just for me

I use selhosted https://github.com/0xERR0R/mailcatcher with ddns domain on my raspberry pi

Maybe https://github.com/0xERR0R/mailcatcher