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by quotemstr 3616 days ago
I've been running my own mail server for years; it's on a linode VPS. I've had zero problems with my outgoing messages being blocked. I don't even bother with inbound filtering: spam is much less a problem these days than it was ten years ago.

Of course, I've configured my server to properly sign email, publish SPF records, and so on. My server may be small, but god damn it, it's top notch.

2 comments

Maybe I'm unlucky, but I get a pretty high volume of incoming spam on my mailserver. However about 99% of it originates from machines that are on essentially all the blacklists, so it's fairly easy to reject it in the SMTP session with a conservative DNSBL check, without getting into spamassassin-style content filtering (I also prefer rejecting in the SMTP session, because on the off chance that there was a false positive, the sender at least gets notified of the non-delivery, instead of their mail being silently eaten).

I agree that outgoing deliverability isn't really a problem for me either. I do have DKIM and SPF set up. I also am a fairly low-volume message source. I think self-hosting is more tricky if you're emitting large volumes of mail, like transactional emails for a business. But as a personal email server it's been fine for me.

Same. I never have any problems. There's even websites that will look at your domain to see if you end up on any blacklists, or if you have any public-facing misconfiguration. Easy to set it up once, and forget about it.