Relay, don’t surrender

A small NGO came to me a few weeks ago. Over the past couple of years, they’ve been slowly and successfully extracting themselves from big tech and onto local, preferably open-source, solutions.

One thing they wanted to do, was move email onto their own self-hosted server under their own rules. Their IT provider said no, told them it wouldn’t work, that they’d end up on spam block lists everywhere and that, in 2026, you should stick with one of the big boys if you wanted your email to flow without hindrance. Google and Microsoft would just refuse to hear from them if they went solo.

This is a common misconception that, as always, is partly based in truth.

When you send an email, your mail server connects to the server hosting your recipient. Let’s say it’s Gmail. Gmail runs a whole bunch of checks to make sure the sending server (yours) has a good reputation, is properly setup, hasn’t been caught doing bad things, and so on. Pass, and your email is let in. Fail and, well, you can guess what happens.

That’s outbound; inbound email has no such problem. Even if your server is unknown, Gmail will happily deliver to it.

So, the fix is simple: setup your own server, but have it relay outgoing email through a service that already has a good reputation (something that’s not easy to build).

Back to the NGO: I built a demo that did exactly that. We used Stalwart on a cheap web host as the email server, and we relayed outgoing email via Scaleway where you get 300 emails before paying 25 cents/1000 emails (other services available).

And it worked, their IT provider was convinced. And so was I – convinced enough that I moved my own email onto an identical setup.

None of this sovereignty work is effortless. But it’s a solvable problem, not a wall.

Colin