Mail-in-a-Box + AWS SES?

Help with Setup/Upgrade
1

In a Reddit discussion about avoiding spam on self-hosted email servers, a fellow mentioned using Mail-in-a-Box to receive emails normally, and routing outgoing email through AWS SES. This seemed like a brilliant and inexpensive way to avoid outgoing email getting tagged as spam.

So I thought that MIAB would just have a relay field that I could set somewhere and be off to the races. It’s looking less and less like that’s the case. In fact, it looks like MIAB doesn’t like to share responsibility for sending email with anything else, especially in regards to SPF records and such.

I’m getting the strong impression that setting MIAB up in this way would be well into unsupported territory. Correct?

2

mailcow might better suit your fancy. take a look at it, that’s what I run now (used to be MIAB)

3

Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll give it a try. It looks like Mailcow’s setup and maintenance are a bit more involved compared to Mail-in-a-Box but that it exposes what is needed to route outgoing email through a relay.

4

Hi,
this is possible but a bit tricky in the configuration, if you have more than one domain it is still possible but even more complicate, but doable.
Check out Postfix relay server configuration, for multi-domain you need a file to match domain with relay server hostname and credentials (also possible)

1 Like
5

The postfix config is overwritten pretty frequently though, that might not be a good option.

6

Yea, you need to forget about upgrades, or redo the postfix setup at each Mailinabox update.
It would be great to have it as a supported feature (The use of third party relays for sending)

7

Thanks for the advice Umberto.

I’ve set up a Mailcow installation with the hope that sending through SES was straightforward. It isn’t. An understanding of Docker is required before playing with Postfix. It’s beginning to gel for me, but it’s been a struggle.

It’s interesting seeing Mail-in-a-Box and Mailcow running side-by-side. SOGo is sure nice. Mail-in-a-Box was definitely easier to set up, mostly because it handles DNS.

8

Hi Mark,
you definitely need to get in the deep of the postfix configuration, is not that hard, just requires some testing.
The problem / advantage of Mailinabox is easy setup and strong community, but if you make changes around they are overwritten at the next update, so good documentation is a must.
Check some docs on using SES with Postfix, if you don’t have multiple domains is fairly easy.
Also consider having two servers, one regular Mailinabox and one Mailinabox dedicated to SES, then have separate IMAP / SMTP servers on your client (or play with DNS :wink:

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