I recently went through a Mautic install on a DigitalOcean box, only to realize DigitalOcean has started blocking mail server ports as of March 2025 (link).
I’m going to see if they’ll open the ports for me. I was wondering though. Does anyone have other VPS recommendations for the self-hosted version of Mautic? I’ve seen Hetzner and Vultr mentioned, although Hetzner also blocks ports out of the gate.
Anyone else on a VPS that they like and has those ports open?
Contabo has them open.
Why don’t you connect to a managed SMTP?
Well, we’re either going to use Amazon SES or Google Workspace. But don’t we still need the mail ports open to use those with Mautic?
Ah okay, I see Mautic is directly connected to symfony mailer and we can send via Amazon SES’s API (link). We’ll just use that 
I’m new to Mautic. Most of the guides I’ve seen show using the SMTP protocol, so I hadn’t realized we could use APIs yet.
Yes, but rather use a Plugin.
Here is a video:
Don’t use Google Workspace, won’t allow you enough emails and feedback loop is crap.