Posthorn, self-hosted mail gateway
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Introducing Posthorn, a self hosted email gateway. One docker container (or Go binary) between every self hosted app on your VPS and your transactional email provider. Set up Posthorn once, point your apps to it, done.I was trying to deploy Ghost on a DigitalOcean droplet and found that DO and many different VPS services have started to block the default SMTP ports to try to combat the various types of abuse they get. To actually configure my app, I had to hack together a Postfix relay.In another project, I had a static site which had a contact form, but my free Formspree account was occasionally hitting usage limits and I desperately wanted some of the anti-spam features they had gated behind their paid accounts so I put together a caddy module to catch HTTP POSTs and bounce them to my provider.I kept bumping into these same email issues. Many of the services I wanted to host (Gitea, Mastodon, Umami, Comentario) ran into the same limitations. This felt like a really common issue that had no good solution.Posthorn is what I built to solve this. It's a small Go binary (or 10 MB docker image) that sits between your self hosted apps and your transactional email provider of choice (shipping with support for Postmark, Resend, Mailgun, Amazon SES or an outbound SMTP relay). It also accepts POSTs from HTML forms to support static site needs while adding security layers such as honeypot fields, origin checks and IP rate limiting. There's also a JSON HTTP API that supports Bearer auth for backend scripts or cron jobs that just want a /send endpoint.I now use this personally in multiple scenarios and I've spent a lot of time beating this up and testing against what I can validate. I'd love to hear how this might be useful for you, what breaks and any feedback you might have. It's open source under Apache 2.0 and I'd love contributions. I'm planning to support and grow this for the long haul.Code: https://github.com/craigmccaskill/posthornDocs: https://posthorn.dev/Longer write up: https://craigmccaskill.com/introducing-posthorn/Previous HN discussion on the exact issue I'm trying to solve: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43620318
HN · launched May 27, 2026 · 83 upvotes (top 11%) · 0 views
Niche: transactional email platforms · 58 launches, 2 in the last 7 days ▼ -71% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Communication
- Developer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 58 launches in transactional email platforms →
Could you build this?
Yes It is a lightweight SMTP proxy and gateway container in Go that forwards outgoing emails to transactional email APIs like SendGrid, Postmark, or AWS SES.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: postfix-sendgrid and postfix-mailgun, ProtonMail Bridge, Parsedmarc, Apprise, Unix mail utilities (mailx/mail)
Concerns raised: Operational costs of running a mail server, DMARC aggregate report handling not included, Complexity of SMTP configuration (TLS vs STARTTLS, port selection, username formats)
Feature requests: Webhook support for multi-channel notifications, HTML email support, Email plus webhook support per request, Built-in standardized API for mail sending across self-hosted services
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 427 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #69 of 428 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 209 days after the earliest competitor.
- VaultSandbox · hn · 2026-01-06 · 58 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- Perch by mxRaven, a self-hosted mailbox and CLI in 1 file · hn · 2026-11-11 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- Self-hosted email server for 2026 · hn · 2026-01-03 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- Grace Mail · ph · 2026-10-10 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- adbtd · ph · 2026-11-09 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Alien · hn · 2026-04-20 · 106 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- TheLittleHost · hn · 2026-03-16 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- GoMailer · ph · 2026-10-12 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.44
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