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Is POP email still a thing?
(lemmy.zip)
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this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2026
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How does it work with network security, do you need to have a SMTP port open to the net?
That would depend on your deployment set up. I do not do that, but many people do. I have a very bespoke ingress route that I coded myself. It consists of a serverless cloudflare edge worker to catch emails, break them into a JSON that is sent over a tunnel to cloudflared as a post. This post is directed at containerized python program that rebuilds the email and that container is the only thing with access to deliver mail to the container running stalwart.
The reason I do this is not security though. It was a personal project more or less to see if it could be done and if it was reliable. Particularly to see if i could make a secure delivery method to bypass my ISPs CGNAT without paying for and maintaining a VPS. So far so good. And it has no monthly fee.
Most people I know of (with CGNAT limitations) are just using a cheap VPS with open ports and then the VPS either has the email server there or a tunnel to the SMTP server. If you have a static IP or a DDNS set up where you can properly port forward, that works too.