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Comment by craigmccaskill | Hacker News Reader

Fair. Don't disagree with anything you're saying here.

I should probably tighten up that line. What I really meant to say is that the average self-hoster who just wants to enable a few services to send email doesn't want to run a mail server. Different audiences, different (and both correct) answers.

I set out to solve some pretty specific problems of my own but I'm genuinely curious how others have tackled these things. Posthorn and Postal don't compete in my head. Postal makes you into your own provider, which is something I personally deeply want to avoid. Posthorn assumes you've already picked a provider (which might be Postal, actually, it would work just fine pointed at a self-hosted Postal instance).

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> the average self-hoster who just wants to enable a few services to send email doesn't want to run a mail server

Maybe I'm confused, maybe the label "self-hoster" is broader than the definition in my mind, but that's exactly what self-hosters want to do, that's why we call ourselves self-hosters, we want to host the stuff we use ourselves :)

If I just wanted to "enable a few services" I'd use AWS or whatever the modern alternatives are.

> If I just wanted to enable a few services I'd use AWS or whatever

But then you'd be using AWS for those services too.

I think there's a meaningful gap between folks who are willing and able to self host their own applications but have decided that running their own MTA is a separate and much harder commitment. Different line, but still self-hosting in any reasonable read of the term. I've been on both sides of that line at one point, I'm trying to avoid going back. :)

> But then you'd be using AWS for those services too.

Yes, so obviously as a self-hoster, that's a no-go. Hence not wanting "to enable a few services", it'd go directly counter to the initial objectives.

But yeah, I hear and agree that there is a spectrum here, self-hosting some parts while relying on others can be a good balance, especially if you have other requirements to consider, like time or resource investments, it's not a black & white decision you should make without careful considerations.

I think you are confused. I self-host a ton of stuff. One thing I have zero interest in is hosting mail and dealing with all of the configuration and possible timebombs waiting before I can even do the single thing I want the service to do. Instead I pay like $5/month for essentially unlimited emails from any domain I control.

That said, none of it has to do with my own personal email, which has been on Gmail for long enough to drink, so we are probably talking about two different situations.

I think the label "self-hoster" might be overly broad in these sort of discussions. Some people considering firing up a VPS and running something like Posthorn "self-hosting" email, just like a bunch of "modern" AI tooling says "local-first" because the CLI runs locally, although all LLM models are remotely called.

Seems to me like there a broad spectrum of "self-hosters", ranging from "I run everything on my hardware in my home" to "I deploy FOSS SaaS software to AWS for us to run", probably neither of these are more/less "self-hosting" than the other.

Damnit, sunk by the T.S. Eliot thing again: “It is impossible to say just what I mean”. I host a bunch of services on a handful of machines locally. The main one of which died two weeks ago and is waiting on a new SSD drive so we can properly test whether the Anible playbook Claude put together for me will spin nine or ten services right back up or whether it’s going to be perfected for the third time I have to build the machine.

> but that's exactly what self-hosters want to do

Only a sith self-hosters want to self-host absolutely everything.

Yeah, agree :) More nuanced update: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48292226

If the self hosters runs a mail server it can receive their transactional emails to themselves and they don't even need to care about delivery to gmail

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