How to set up low volume send/receive email Server on Azure low cost on Virtual CPU?

Question

I would like to setup a low volume, low cost send.receive Email Server on a Azure virtual processor with a business specific email address. What is the best way to do this?

Answer 1

Hello, @DonBaechtel-7903 !

Edit: We've received your feedback and I've added more information specific to receiving emails. I do want to underscore that prior to taking on this effort, you confirm that you meet the subscription requirements for sending outgoing email from Azure and you are aware of the hurdles involved with making sure that outgoing emails are received. There are unfortunately those who would use inexpensive and potentially ephemeral email servers for illegitimate purposes and as a result, safeguards have been put in place.

How do I set up a low volume send/receive email Server on Azure?

I'm going to echo a bit of what @anza has said as there are new Azure services for high volume, transactional emails however for lower volume you would need to use an authenticated SMTP relay service to send email from Azure VMs (or Azure App Service). SendGrid in particular is mentioned several times in the Azure documentation however there are many choices out there. A blog by June Castillote does a good job of going through these options in more detail:

https://adamtheautomator.com/azure-email-service/

It is important to note that outbound email messages that are sent directly to external domains (such as outlook.com and gmail.com) from a virtual machine are made available only to certain subscription types in Microsoft Azure:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-network/troubleshoot-outbound-smtp-connectivity

To learn more about getting started with SendGrid on Azure, check out the "Sending email with Microsoft Azure" documentation from SendGrid:

Sending Email with Microsoft Azure

Receiving Emails

After ensuring that you qualify to send email, it's possible to receive email using services like SendGrid however setting up your own SMTP relay that works as a mail relay service is possible using a Windows Server VM and there are even offerings on the Azure Marketplace:

• SMTP WebMail Server (Cloud Infrastructure Services)
• Azure VM as SMTP Relay

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