What are you using for this type of thing?

I just created a send-only mailbox in the account I already have at my hosting service and use this in all my services.

I’m not going to set up a mail server and deal with all the security issues and problems with private dial-up IP addresses myself. Been there, done that. Wasn’t fun.

I’m hosting Mailcow in a cheap VPS, for both personal/family and system emails. Not something I’d necessarily recommend (it’s overkill for your requirements anyway), but the initial setup and maintenance are not nearly as difficult as people will try to make you believe. Before that I just used Gmail. You can point your sending application to smtp.gmail.com, STARTLS on port 587 or SSL on port 465, username is your email address, and a Gmail app password you create beforehand.

For inbound, I use Postfix + rspamd + dovecot directly to my server. Outbound, I used to send it directly from my server. I did this 15+ years with DKIM, DMARC, and SPF. It worked well for like 95% of the emails I sent, but I started relaying through smtp2go.com after I had just a couple really important emails not get delivered or me not be sure if the recipient saw them.

I use smtp2go.com rather than deal with ptr records on my dynamic residential address

I’m not too concerned, for example, if they have to check their spam folders

Then you can self host. I use stalwart but in your case I would probably use mox

I verified my domain with Proton and I can send mails from my domain through their servers and pass all sender verification and reputation tests. This works without needing to control a public IP in a range that is allowed to send mail to the common mail services.

I use Brevo.com which gives a generous 300 emails per day limit on the free plan.

I will say that the web portal is a bit confusing but once you set it up you basically never need to go there again.

I’m using nullmailer, it’s as simple as it gets and has worked flawlessly for me for many years now:

https://untroubled.org/nullmailer/

I’m not too concerned, for example, if they have to check their spam folders. As long as the email still lands.

In that case, it really isn’t that much of a hassle. A basic mail system isn’t that complicated to set up (just make sure you have proper authentication and such, don’t host an open relay!). I actually did this not too long ago, using maddy, which unlike the traditional postfix+dovecot setup (which I had also been looking into) means you don’t even have to host separate services for SMTP and IMAP, and it also automates most additional things that are necessary nowadays for you, like TLS, DKIM, DMARC, and so on. Not quite everything though, there’s still stuff needed to do manually, mostly to set the SPF and DMARC records in the DNS, but it’s been working really well so far.

And really, the only mail provider you have to worry about for putting your mails into spam is gmail. They’re the worst. (maybe microsoft-hosted outlook too, but I haven’t encountered anyone using that)

@crandall selfhosting an email server is far from being a hassle. Nowadays it is really easy. You can setup everything in less an hour.
I use stalwart + a postfix relay on a cheap vps.

Maybe it’s a bit off-topic, but for my transactional emails, I use Scaleway TEM’s free tier. 300 mails/month are included, if you go above, it’s 0.25€ per 1000 mails. Dirt cheap. Never have I gone above the free tier limit. And it saves me from the hassle to have to setup something to send emails on thr server itself. Note that I had strange behavior while I tried to validate my domain while I used CloudFlare’s nameservers.

My ISP offers unauthenticated SMTP for their customer addresses. It’s pretty heavily rate limited, but well enough for the occasional status email my system throws out. At least around here they are pretty common for residential customers, so that might be an option.

Other possibility is to set up SMTP relay to your network and give it credentials to an actual email account (with SMTP support, which isn’t granted these days). It can take in emails from your network without credentials and throw them to the internet with your account. It’s pretty simple to set up, search for postfix + smarthost. Added bonus is that you can read the replies to that address too via your email provider services.

If its internal network traffic only, you can just use stalwart and add the DNS records to your network so that stuff can use SMTP.

Otherwise, (also with stalwart or your preferred software), you will want to use an SMTP relay so that outgoing messages will be delivered without the hassle of getting your domain reputational enough for sent messages not getting junked by the big email providers.

I’m extra lazy and haven’t set this up, so I just have a public mail server that only receives messages because my outgoing SMTP port is blocked by my ISP.

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Mxroute.com .