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Email not set up correctly
(bilin.xyz)
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this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2024
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I am not too sure about this. The OP only needs outgoing email for a Lemmy instance. Setting up a self-hosted email server for just that, having to keep the software updated and avoid or solve problems with outgoing emails would not be my choice in this case. This blog post going viral in 2022 https://cfenollosa.com/blog/after-self-hosting-my-email-for-twenty-three-years-i-have-thrown-in-the-towel-the-oligopoly-has-won.html had some points. If you still think that self hosting email is easy, go hang out in the Disroot XMPP community chat for a while and you may hear some Disroot admins swear about email delivery problems, especially with email to Microsoft.
Well, I'm actually self-hosting an email server with mailcow for one of my projects and it's been pretty smooth, with minimal maintenance. Just running some upgrade command every once in a while to upgrade the docker container, and attaching a bigger disk when the old one was almost full. The biggest blocker was asking my VPS vendor to open up the port as they'll only open it for customers older than 6 months.
Most of the problems encountered by those people you mentioned are probably because they're running it for other people. You can't control what other people send so you'll eventually get blocklisted when one of your users starts sending spam because their account was hacked.
Yes, sure, self-hosting email can go fine for a long time, depending on the amount of users that you have and what your users do (For example : try bulk email) and whom they want to email with, or send emails to mailing lists, or use email forwarding. The OP wants to run a Lemmy instance and have email out working, probably just for notifications. Using a transactional email provider for the latter seems like a sensible choice to me.