[TriLUG] recommendations for on-line Linux VM

[Alan Porter via TriLUG]

Thanks, Lance, for the tip on DuoCircle!

I run two Linodes, with web and email services on both.  One of them
is for personal stuff, and the other one is for paying customers.

I also set up TriLUG's email on pilot back in 2009.
https://alanporter.com/blog/2009-03-01/pwn3d

On all of those systems, outgoing email has been a hassle.  For the
most part, it works.  But there are always a few recipient domains that
just refuse to accept email from me, even though I have had the same
IPs for a decade.  They're just in a bad neighborhood (Linode).

A month or so ago, I set up my personal mail server to relay selected
emails through "SMTP2GO", another SMTP relay with a free 1000/mo tier.
Today, I set up my professional server with DuoCircle, also on a free
1000/mo tier.  The difference is if I need to scale up, DuoCircle has
smaller scale-up steps.

Both SMTP2GO and DuoCircle are pretty simple to use.

It DOES kind of feel like selling out.  But my other alternative was
the BIG sell-out, migrating to GMail.  At least this way, I still run
my own mail server, still control lots of mail aliases at my own 
domains,
and I can choose which recipients get their email directly from me vs
through this verified-clean relay service.

Alan


On 2025-02-18 09:57, Lance A. Brown via TriLUG wrote:
> My personal email service has been a journey.  I've been with Lumos
> (nee Northstate) at my current home since 2019 and really enjoy their
> service.  I was running into problems delivering outbound mail
> directly from my server at home, so I set up a relayhost to a linode
> VPS.  That worked OK for a while but someone "near" my linode's IP
> address damaged the reputation for at least one CIDR range including
> my server's IP.  I fixed that by signing up for free outbound SMTP
> relay from DuoCircle (https://www.duocircle.com/).  Now, my outbound
> mail from my personal server at home and the mail service's I have
> running on my linodes goes through them.  It took a bit to get SPF,
> DKIM, and DMARC going properly and now I have almost zero problems
> with outbound deliverability.
>
> --[Lance]