Setting up your own e-mail/smtp for alerts?

Hi,

I'm looking for some way to send my own alerts via e-mail in some way. Whenever I try to search for this, most docker images have a much grander goal, and I have a hard time understanding how to use them for my purpose.

What would I want? It'd be nice to have a docker running some smpt-server (I suppose), so that I can make my own python script that scrapes a website, looks at some metric, and e-mails me whenever whatever I'm looking for is found. I only want it to be available on and to receive mails from localhost, no dns, just forward e-mails to my personal one, no web-interface, etc.

I'm quite new to self-hosting, but I hope you still understand what I'm looking for. Is it possible? Should I look for another solution? Will this not work? Any help/input very much welcome.

16 comments

You don't need an SMTP server if you just want to send mail out outbound. Just use mailx.
- This is the way, @mumblefish. I use mail from mailutils:
  
  mail "$recipient" \ -r "$emailFrom" \ -s "$emailSubject" \ < "$filename"
  where $filename is a file containing the body content of the email.
  
  I wanted to try this first, I can see lemmy parsed a less-than into "lt;", which I replaced. But I'm getting no e-mails to the $recipient address. I set $emailFrom to a completely fake one, and another time as my personal, same as $recipient, address, but I'm not receiving any e-mails.
- I tried a:
  
  echo "something" | mailx -s "subject" [my_personal_email]
  but I'm not receiving anything... hmm
Check out ntify, it might fit your use case
For a second I thought I had made the perfect solution for this, but then I realized my problem was the opposite. I was looking for a way to receive notifications from systems that can only send emails. So I quickly made the Mail2Gotify service and have been using it for the past while.
I'll post it here anyway in case you want to switch from emails to Gotify in the future!
https://github.com/MattMckenzy/Mail2Gotify
I know it's not exactly what you're looking for but I've explored some (free) options myself with good deliverability and ended up settling on smtp2go. Tied it to my domain, and it allows me to send 1000 emails/month hassle free. Everything else I looked into either wouldn't get delivered or costed way more I thought was worth for simple notifications.
I'll echo the other comment and say gotify could be a great option as well, I only stuck with email because it's easier on less tech literate family I provide services to and whatnot.

16 comments