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[Abandoned all hope] Trying to self-hosting a mail server, but port 25 is blocked by my ISP

So, I spent the last few days researching and then finally setting up mailcow. I got my domain name, my wildcard certificate, got all the containers up, disabled ipv6 (I don't have it set up on my home router and am too lazy to set it up tbh), created a domain and an mailbox, etc.

Well, when testing it late last night, I found that I could receive mail but was getting timeouts when sending mail. After some googling, I found out that this will happen if port 25 is not open. Using traceroute, I found that port 25 traffic is not going outside my home network. And sure enough, I found on my ISP web site that I need to have a business account to unblock port 25, which costs twice what I am paying for internet now.

So what are my options? Is there any way around this? Do I need to host this elsewhere, such as AWS? Can I use a proxy or something that can translate it to a different port for me?

Edit: Yeah, so I just set up an alias to my existing email address. It isn't what I wanted to do, but as many have pointed out, I'm fighting a losing battle here. :(

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  • This is completely standard for residential ISPs at least in the US. Your options are to either host this elsewhere or use a smarthost (somewhat of a proxy) for outbound mail.

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