I bought a domain to use for my homelab. I would like to set up postfix on my proxmox server so I can receive email notifications for backups and updates. I thought it would be nice to be able to use my domain for my emails and maybe even start using it for my personal email. I keep hearing that setting up your own email server is giant pain the @$$ and it’s not worth the headache. I was wondering if anyone would recommend a good email service to use? Is there anything out there that is free to use? This is not being used for business, so I can’t justify a recurring expense. I would love to hear any recommendations.
We use ProtonMail (and ProtonVPN); they have a free tier but I don’t know if you can attach your own domain to the free one. You can with the very inexpensive paid tiers. They also have a nice calender.
I think if you want to have an external email you can set it to be the MX for your domain, and then make your lab a subdomain (with names like pc01.lab.mydomain.com) and then have your local log/notification email server have an MX for the subdomain?
We just use a non-public domain for our home network that doesn’t even share with any public-facing domains, because it’s just a lot easier and we never saw a benefit to having them linked DNS-wise.
With Pi-Hole, it’s super easy to have our private DNS run by it, and our DHCP too. Also, we found that Exim is lots easier to configure than postfix, FWIW. Then we can just set up SquirrelMail to read the local mail and keep it in a browser tab.