Quitting self-hosted email after 18 years

Recently I was writing some code to send transactional emails for a project but I had to stop for some serious thought when it came time to configure the SMTP hostname and authentication details.

I’d been self-hosting email for a long time so the first option was to start digging though old Ansible playbooks to add additional domains and accounts to my existing setup. The downside to this would be that email deliverability is arguably a lot more challenging now and if the project ever got any traction I’d effectively be running an email hosting company. So I started looking at alternatives.

For purely transactional emails sending through Amazon SES appeared the best choice but I was also interested in having an inbox to send and receive project-related emails.

Most hosted email accounts were priced equivalent to what I’d been paying to rent a server but then I noticed MXroute was having a promotion: a one-off setup fee of $248 plus $1/year for unlimited domains and unlimited accounts. Plus the bulk of their business seemed to be transactional email. For a very reasonable price I could migrate away from running an email server completely as well as satisfy the email requirements of any number of projects. I couldn’t argue against it.

After signing up and adding some domain and account details I ran imapsync overnight to migrate across my Maildir from the existing server. The next day I updated the DNS for the domain, reconfigured the email clients on my laptop and phone and sent a test email from the project I was working on. Everything worked without a problem. A last run of imapsync to check just the inbox and I was confident I could shutdown the server and forget about the pain of self-hosted email. What a relief!