One more thing: don’t confuse email and web hosting.

I highly recommend using a 3rd-party SMTP host for all outgoing email needs. 

You set them up with one account, and then you can add additional domains to it. You set up SPF, DKIM, and the other stuff for each domain separately.

I just set something up on MailJet. It’s not the simplest, but it’s a LOT simpler than SendGrid.

They have a free account with something like 200 emails per day and 6000 per month before you have to pay for anything.  There are tons of these services around, and most have a free tier that’s fine for most personal needs as long as you’re not sending out a newsletter.

Now, every *nix web host already has an STMP host built-in because as I understand things, Linux won’t work without an MTA since it uses it to send stuff between different parts of itself.

Sendmail, mailman, and exit are three commonly used MTAs. 

If you want to set up an externally accessible email, they have support for POP3 and IMAP/MAPI.

You can access your email via a web mail service on the host, or run an email client on any other computer that can reach the server. Outlook is popular, along with Thunderbird which is free.

I run Macs, and I have one machine that runs their Mail client that I’m using now. It’s configured to send out mails via my MailJet SMTP host.

If you use Wordpress, or by extension, PHP, it uses the local SMTP host by default for outgoing emails. It’s easy to reconfigure it to use another SMTP host.

The point is, if you have a domain hosted on a *nix server, then you’ve got all you need. The email is built-in; you can use a remote SMTP host that your email client and hosted apps use to sent out email; and your mail client can poll the built-in mailboxes using either POP3 or IMAP/MAPI from any other computer you might have.

Since most hackers are mainly interested in hijacking your SMTP Relay to send out bulk emails, it’s far better to use an external SMTP host and throttle-down your SMTP host and shut off the Relay if you can (but I’m not sure it’s possible). By not configuring your SPF, DKIM, etc, there, it will be useless for anybody to use it.

FWIW, the IP will be that of the SMTP host itself, not the machine where the messages are submitted from.

-David Schwartz

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