It’s a bad title, but I’m trying to figure out how to describe what I want.
First, I got my photoprism working thru cloudflare. Now, on the same domain I would like an email address.
So mysite.com gets routed to 56.654.234.12 let’s say by cloudflare such that a global user never sees my ip. But mail.mysite.com that’s different, they don’t proxy email so if you do a reverse lookup you can find the origin IP.
I heard about tunnels so I stupidly signed up for that, only to learn that a tunnel just lets you into an internal network. So an SMTP server can’t get emails from outside that way.
Ideally, somehow I could setup one user at Gmail or proton mail, then somehow setup the same or different user...user1@mysite.com and I could then use mailu, mailcow, mail docker to house my user1@mysite.com which routes mail thru Gmail or protonmail. I know all this makes little sense because I don’t know the proper way, so that’s my question for you smart people who have done this twice over. Could someone point me to the best way of setting up a local mail server that routes thru cloudflare but is not easily reverse looked up? Is that even a problem at all?
In the end, I want to have my emails self hosted from my house. Meaning that I can go to my local computers or my phone locally or remotely to the mailu interface, I can send and receive emails using my user1@mysite.com email and none of that email ends up on a Gmail or protonmail server stuck there forever. I can’t download all my Gmail to Thunderbird on my computer because then my phone would not have access to it. So to me that just means that I need to host the email server at home, but how to safely access it is the ideal solution.
Avoiding spam filters and ISP blocks are a common issue with self hosted email.
Ideally you’ll have a mature domain, dkim configured and an IP that’s not blacklisted on a network that allows email traffic.
OVH offers pretty cheap email hosting if you just want a turn key solution.
Otherwise if you want your home lab to work this way you may need to configure something akin to a forward proxy on a VPS to act as a gateway for your homelab.
This could be achieved using wireguard and iptables. By routing the email traffic to your homelab.
If you don’t mind having email go through Gmail etc, then you might not want to full host, but just run a local IMAP server. There are some pop to SMTP solutions you can use to pull your emails (fetchmail.) you can then use your account as an outbound relay. Keep in mind you’ll only be able to set this up for a single account if you use something like Gmail.
If you buy a business product like workspace or m365, you should be able to setup relay/hybrid connectors for multiple accounts.