So, I’m trying to set up a self-hosted mastodon instance, and of course this requires an email service. Self hosting one is not an option, because of anti-spam stuff, or so everyone says. The recommendations are to use services like mailgun or postmark, but there’s one thing I don’t really understand:
All these services require verification of an email to be able to send from it. For example, if I want to use noreply[at]mydomain.com with mailgun, I need to click a link sent to that address, which to me feels like a catch-22. How can I receive that email if I don’t have the email service set up yet? Do I have to set the domain up with some private email service (protonmail, tuta…) first?
Any help is appreciated, I’m pretty new at this.
Edit: Alright, so it seems that Mailgun actually doesn’t require this weird confirmation email, just dns records. The first one I tried, SendPulse, did. Postmark requires an email from the domain at signup. Hope someone else can learn from this.
Idk what mailgun is doing, but many services verify your domain by having you add a specific TXT DNS record or automatic verification by logging into Cloudflare (if that’s where your Domains at) or something
Do you have any specific recommendations?
ETA: A lot of the services I’ve seen even require signing up with a custom domain, meaning I can’t even get past that stage (well, I could use my personal domain I guess, but I’d rather not).