this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2025
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Nextcloud, Qbittorrent, Truenas and loads of other svcs take optional email credentials for sending alerts and other features (eg. password recovery for nextcloud).

What email providers do people usually use to make this process simple to set up? For example, Microsoft doesn't allow basic auth anymore so it's supposedly not possible to use via most of these setups, and some other services seem like they have a low inbox size (does this matter?)

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (27 children)

Email is my biggest frustration in self-hosting. So many services are dependent on it for reasons no one seems to be able to explain. It costs money to run it. And just the experience of email is atrocious. I don't understand why we haven't moved on from it. We have browser notifications, we have app notifications (both via big tech and NTFY), we have a thousand other chat platforms you can communicate through. It just boggles my mind that we haven't moved away from this archaic technology.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (11 children)

It just boggles my mind that we haven’t moved away from this archaic technology.

None of the alternatives are as standardized as plain old email. You can use whatever you like to read them, you don't have to rely on a single company like Meta with WhatsApp for communication, it's easy to use, pretty damn reliable and fault resistant and just ticks all the boxes you'll ever need for a simple message delivery.

Personally I would absolutely hate if software started to offer notifications only on slack or signal or whatever. Just let me have my email and I can then read it with a browser in library, on my cellphone, on my desktop and laptop and on pretty much every other internet connected device on the planet. And if I want, I can pass that trough to teams, sms, all the messaging platforms and even straight to my printer should I need to. With other message delivery options that's often either pretty difficult or straight up impossible.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

it’s easy to use, pretty damn reliable

Unfortunately not when you’re self hosting… Can’t rely on it when you’re supposed to receive an email (account validation, reset password email,…) which never arrives and you’re stuck clicking on « resend the email » on the website with no hope…

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

I meant that the technology itself is reliable. And you can do self hosting just fine too, I've been doing it since 2010 or so, but running a local smarthost which sends messages via reputable SMTP provider works just fine too. Or even directly interacting with the SMTP provider from all the applications you're running.

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