Editing Introduction to a Self Managed Life: a 13 hour & 28 minute presentation by FUTO software (section)

== Why do I need SMTP relay? ==

You need an SMTP relay server if you want people to actually see your email. No man is an island, and none of your mail is going to go anywhere without an SMTP relay. Gmail, etc., everyone will ''“lol''” at you if they see you sending email from your home email server.

As a society, we have chosen being spam-free over email sovereignty. You’re welcome to ''try'' running an email server on your residential internet account, but your mail is not going to get anywhere.

I’m not suggesting your email will end up in spam. It will be rejected by the server before its spam filter even sees it.

99% of the time that a major email server receives mail from a server on a residential internet connection, it’s from someone who got hacked &amp; is now unknowingly spamming half of the internet. We traded freedom to be rid of spam.

Whether or not you think this is fair is irrelevant; it’s how the world is. If you want your email to make it to most of your intended recipients, you need an SMTP relay.

SMTP relay sends your mail through postmark’s trusted server. Using postmark, icloud/gmail will let your mail through, rather than assume some schmuck running windows xp service pack 1 with his banking password post-it-noted to his monitor is part of a spam botnet.

Think of it like doing business in NYC. You are paying a troll toll for the ability to send email. But Postmark are nice people, so you’ll enjoy it. I hope they don’t cancel my services on account of me comparing them to [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFVwQCFhKSE&list=PLkVbIsAWN2lvzWirQsz6haGEjJ2b2e6Ho&index=2 New York City government]. I’m sorry, postmark; that was uncalled for. :’(

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