A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Self hosted ntfy and mailrise. Mailrise is a wrapper for apprise that let's you send emails to it and in turn converts the email to the desired push alert.
For password resets or account creation welcome emails I'd use a SMTP service. I use SMTP2GO for those. Free plan is something 1000 emails a month. I've been using them for a year and think I've sent maybe 5 or 10 emails.
PurelyMail is what I use. It's been great so far. I've been using it for over a year for this exact use case.
I use MXRoute, which is a similar tiny/one-person email service. Also great so far. I use it for personal stuff + a client's professional business emails, and haven't had any issues with either.
Supporting small businesses like these feels great!
Install dovecot and set up your email client to connect to it. Email is trivial if you're not sending to other hosts.
I use SMTP2GO (with my own domain) with the free plan (1000 email per month) that's way over a selfhoster needs.
FastMail is nice.
or (I don’t recommend it) you could learn to:
Stalwart mail
Email is like, the worst possible option. Check out Apprise. Super easy to setup Telegram or Discord notifications via webhooks. Takes like a minute.
Under things me and my users notice aren't working right away, at the top of the list is email. So I notice when those alerts aren't able to get through, because if email is down I have my phone ringing off the hook because my dad can't get to his online auctions to see if he won that toaster for $5. So email is like, the best option.
I use docker-mail-server
smtp_to_telegram
Similar idea, but a different service if you like gotify: https://github.com/tystuyfzand/gotify-smtp
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.
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.
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
Decentralization is not a concept that is reserved for SMTP
Personally I would absolutely hate if software started to offer notifications only on slack or signal or whatever.
No one suggested such a thing. I suggested several other alternatives that aren't reliant on any particular company or service, and are easier to run and manage without requiring approval from your ISP or whatever else.
With other message delivery options that's often either pretty difficult or straight up impossible.
With other options you wouldn't need to because they already provide the features you're looking for in those apps.
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…
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.
Universiality, basically: almost everyone, everywhere has an email account, or can find one for free. As well as every OS and every device has a giant pile of mail clients for you to chose from.
And I mean, email is a simple tech stack and well understood and reliable: I host an internal mail server for notifications and updates and shit, and it's rapid, fast, and works perfectly.
It's only when you suddenly need to email someone OTHER than your local shit that it turns to complete shit.
Because it's universal, it works, it's multi-platform, device agnostic and it's simple to use user side.
Nothing else available really fits that criteria.
The closest in todays age is probally discord or teams, but neither of which are decentralized. XMPP could work for it, but nobody really uses it anymore and to be honest the standard is ugly as hell to implement.
Browser Notifications are ineffective and have a high probability of failing or not being seen, they are more meant for real-time notices not historical notices not to mention locked to that browser.
App notifications would be amazing for things with apps, but not everyone wants to be forced into using their mobile device for everything, and it would again only be available from said app(unless you do use something like NTFY), which would generally be locked down to a device
Email sucks admin side, but there's a reason its used.
This is also ignoring the multi-use case that email allows for such as authentication as well, so if its already being stored for accounts, might as well use it for notifications
Because it's universal, it works, it's multi-platform, device agnostic and it's simple to use user side. Nothing else available really fits that criteria.
I already listed a handful of other platforms that check all those same things without being a pain in the ass to host, being sucky to use, or requiring approval from your ISP.
XMPP could work for it, but nobody really uses it anymore and to be honest the standard is ugly as hell to implement.
Uglier than email? Nah.
it would again only be available from said app(unless you do use something like NTFY)
Yes, NTFY is another example I already gave.
which would generally be locked down to a device
No it's not.
so if its already being stored for accounts, might as well use it for notifications
It shouldn't be used for accounts. That was my entire point. I host a dozen services and half of them no one else can use because the software mandates email verification, which I can't use because my ISP doesn't think I should be allowed to for some reason.
How do you send a browser notification if the browser is closed?
I don't know how to answer that. That's just how they work.
I don't have much issue with email as a technology. It does what it needs to do, and does it well. The client side software is what hasn't budged in years - Search barely works, files and attachments are cumbersome, and spam is still rampant.
It would be much cheaper and easier if users weren't centralised under a few big providers that prefer to bar any and all access to said users if you're self hosting, making it almost mandatory to use a private service.
The issue is that my ISP blocks it. And so any service that requires it is inherently broken.
The solution to spam is to require invitations.
they cannot block what is internal. google does not need to be aware of your internal activities anyway
you can selectively mark mails as read that don't need attention anymore, and keep as unread those that do. how would you do that with ntfy, or messaging services? at most you can mark unread a whole topic or chatroom
and no, I don't want to make gitea issues for every single alert. (though.. why not?). it would be very fragile anyway I would assume
You only need SMTP server, so the inbox size doesn't matter (assuming you have another email where you want to receive those notifications). And even if you have separate inbox for alerts it's quite unlikely that you get hundreds of megabytes worth of alerts every day and they're pretty much useless after a day or two so there's no need to keep them around.
In here ISPs commonly have SMTP service included on their service, so that's worth checking. Beyond than that, any at least somewhat reputable provider will do as long as they provide traditional SMTP service. One option is to use a relay host on local network which sends mail trough a smart host so you can just use local unauthenticated SMTP server for all the things you run and that one service will then push the messages to the internet.
Find out if your ISP provides an SMTP smarthost.
Worth noting that in Finland they are also by law required to log metadata of delivered mails.
I'm using smtp gotify , been using it for a while now and it seems OK for alerts and outer features
I use gmail. You just have to set up an "app" password. I always have to search for how to do that, but once you have an app password you're off and running.
I also just started hosting my own nfty and have been moving as much as possible to that. So far I've replaced two email notifications with push notifications, which is nice.
I've been pretty lazy with this.
I used to use my hotmail account, but they disabled password auth for smtp and many programs dont support 0auth2.
With that change, I just moved to using gmail. You've gotta create an App Password for smtp, but other wise works fine.
I've just been too lazy to move out of gmail+hotmail. Maybe one day
It's not really that privacy friendly, but I use zoho. You can send emails free from aliases with your own domain name so I have emails coming from nextcloud@mydomain pve@mydomain etc.
I ended up setting up a postal server on my vps (see here). Their docs are pretty easy to follow through and it's probably the cheapest option (assuming you already use the and have a domain).
I do this with my home network using FastMail. You can create App specific passwords for each service you add email notification support for. This means you don’t risk compromising your full accounts passwords. You can also put constraints on each app password, such as limiting it only to sending emails but not reading email or looking at your contacts and files. This is nice in case any of my passwords are leaked.
I moved to Google workspace for email, yes I know it Google.
I have my home IP and dedi IP in the routing settings, then just use SMTP to Google and let them forward to me.
All servers have null mail installed and setup for Google, I also have docker containers with config if needed
I started running into the same problem about 2 years ago. Found a company called Send in Blue ( which has since been bought and is now called Brevo). They're a commercial mail sender but have a free tier. How long that will continue to be available, I don't know, but for now it solves my email sending issues.