Overlay / Self-hosted SMTP
Keep your own SMTP. Add a team and a safety net.
Running your own Postfix or SMTP infrastructure gives you full control and the full operational burden: warming, blocklists, patching, scaling, and the 3 a.m. pages. Egressif sits on top of your infrastructure and supplies the operating layer and the team.
The gap
What self-hosting actually costs.
- ▸ You own warming, blocklists, patching, scaling, and the 3 a.m. pages.
- ▸ One listed IP and you are firefighting reputation alone.
- ▸ There is no team watching the wire when mail starts to degrade.
- ▸ Redundancy and failover are projects, not settings.
How the overlay works
Your ESP becomes one path. We become the layer above it.
What the layer adds
What you gain on top of moving mail.
Monitoring on the wire
We watch the actual responses your sends get from receivers, in real time, across every path. Blocklistings, reputation signals, deferral waves, and auth failures get caught as they happen, not in a weekly export.
Ordered failover
Your providers and our network become ordered paths. When one is blocked or throttled, traffic moves to the next automatically. A single provider having a bad day stops being your outage.
Route engineering
Decide how mail leaves: which path per destination, priority for time-sensitive messages, per-receiver throttles, separate lanes per stream. Routing becomes something you configure, not something a single vendor decides for you.
Suppression at the gate
Bounces, complaints, and do-not-contact requests are enforced beneath every application and every path, so an upstream mistake cannot send to someone who already opted out.
Evidence per message
For every message: which server accepted it, when, over what TLS, with the verbatim response, retained on your terms rather than expiring in a provider’s short window.
One provider for the whole stack
DNS, mailboxes, and sending under one operator instead of a different vendor for each layer. Fewer seams, and one team accountable when something breaks instead of a finger-pointing call.
Consolidated view
Every stream and every path in one place: what sent, what landed, what is at risk. Stop stitching together a separate dashboard per vendor to answer one question.
One vendor, one bill, one API
A single relationship, a single invoice, and one API for provisioning and delivery events, instead of integrating, reconciling, and paying several.
No migration
You keep your provider, your templates, and your code. Point your sending at us and your current setup keeps carrying traffic until you are satisfied.
Stream separation
Transactional and marketing stop sharing a reputation. Each stream earns its own, so a campaign can never sink a password reset.
Keep self-hosted SMTP
What stays. What changes.
Your own infrastructure stays as a routed path under the operating layer, so you keep the control you built. We add monitoring, suppression, evidence, and a second path on our network, so a listed IP or a downed node is a reroute, not an outage. Migrate fully later if you ever want to.
Two ways to work with us
Overlay today, whole stack later. Both work.
Start as a layer above self-hosted SMTP. If you ever want us to own DNS, mailboxes, and the network too, the path is already there.
Managed
We run it for you.
Routing, suppression, warming, reputation, and incident response are ours. You get plain-language reporting on what happened and what we did. The email part of your week goes quiet.
Self-serve
You drive it.
Provision domains and mailboxes, set routing and fallbacks, and pull delivery data through the console and API. The same engine, operated by your team, at your pace.
FAQ
Running self-hosted SMTP? Answered.
Do we have to give up our own servers?
No. Your infrastructure stays as a routed path. We add the operating layer and a fallback on our network. You can migrate fully onto us later, or never.
What do we stop owning?
The lonely parts: watching the wire, reacting to blocklistings, enforcing suppression, and keeping evidence. The control you wanted from self-hosting stays yours.
What happens when one of our IPs gets listed?
Traffic fails over to a clean path on our network automatically while the listing is worked, instead of your mail backing up behind a single listed IP.
Put the operating layer on top of self-hosted SMTP.
Tell us your volume and what hurts. We will show you exactly what the layer adds, and what it costs, in one conversation.