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by throwaway6556 3376 days ago
Stop spreading FUD.

I've been running my own email server for a year without delivery issues to Gmail or Outlook/Office 365.

Just make sure your VPS IP is not blacklisted, and play the DKIM/etc game. You'll be fine.

4 comments

It’s not that easy.

I’ve had proper DKIM, proper SPF, my IP wasn’t blacklisted anywhere.

But I still ended up in Spam.

So I had to send for about a year emails to friends every few days, replicating our discussions on WhatsApp etc (so they’d have organic content), and I’d ask them to mark them as "not spam".

Now I end up in their normal Inbox.

EDIT: Why the downvotes? Please comment instead what you think is wrong – or how else do you think I should get my personal domain trusted?

> EDIT: Why the downvotes? Please comment instead what you think is wrong – or how else you think I should get my personal domain trusted enough?

I don't understand the downvotes either. So I upvoted your comment to counteract them.

I've found myself doing that more and more lately. I'll upvote a comment I disagree with if it was made politely and in good faith, and it appears to be getting downvoted unfairly.

That is correct, the age of the domain and the "not spam" click matter a lot.

If you want a new domain and have little traffic (e.g. personal domain), you're fucked.

UPDATE: In case someone ever wants to know more details about why my server failed verification, here are checks for that domain I took when changing DKIM keys last (today):

http://i.imgur.com/9zqILRk.png

https://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=blacklist%3akusc...

http://i.imgur.com/VIH4jlt.png

thanks for making me learn about mail-tester.com though you should probably obfuscate the email addresses in those images.
Don't worry — those email addresses in the images are public ones controlled by me.

I even have one of them in my HN profile if I recall correctly.

The thing is, and this is the current state of email in general, aka not just google, using an email server other than from [big cloud], like say from my local ISP or a large shared hosting provider, you will run into issues. Usually fine, but every few months your (my) server's ip will randomly get blacklisted for a few days, and for a small biz you'll have customers occasionally not receive your email.

Random blacklisting maybe is less of an issue if you run your own server with a unique ip only you use, but for most people it's getting harder and harder not to use gmail/outlook/lycos.

So ya fuck spammers.

Yeah, people can still run their own mail servers without too much work. I've had one for a couple years but I ran into issues with Google tagging my mail as spam at first. It was a while back but I think they want domain owners to verify their ownership with Google's webmaster tools.[1]

My server worked better after adding a TXT record with google-site-verification + all the normal DKIM stuff.

EDIT: here's a better link https://support.google.com/a/answer/183895?hl=en

[1] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35179?hl=en

Thank you for this.

I plan to roll my own email server in the near future, due to legal and privacy concerns. As I understand it, in the US email archives aren't protected under the Fourth Amendment because they're asking for data from a third party, and the Fourth Amendment only applies to self-incrimination.

As I understand it, in the US email archives aren't protected under the Fourth Amendment

Currently, as I understand they are not. But, there is legislation [1] which proposes extending Fourth Amendment protection to e-mails and communication stored on your behalf on third party servers. I've already written to my Congressperson in support of that bill.

[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/387/

IANAL, but...

5th amendment is self-incrimination, 4th is unwarranted search and seizure.

I don't know the current law, but it used to be that e-mails left on a server for more than 6 months were treated like abandoned property, which has a lower-bar to clear for the 4th amendment. I seem to recall hearing that this was changed a while back though.

How the 4th amendment applies to any case is complicated though because it's very much a sliding scale of intrusiveness, with higher levels of intrusiveness requiring more cause for searching.