[stefan_]

Indeed, self-hosted email is commonly rejected despite doing all these things.

Google et al have successfully turned email into the domain of a few SaaS, and at half of them blatant spammers can message millions with no record of consent with the most obvious scams and have it delivered into the inbox. Hell, most spam these days I get from hacked Gmail accounts. The game is rigged, as they say.

[1over137]

I often see this repeated, but in my experience self-hosted email works just fine as long as your IP has a good reputation, and isn't on some crappy bulk VPS.

[sbuk]

I have a mail server on Hetzner and one on Vultr, neither have problems delivering to any service. That said, both domains are fully and correctly configured. Banners match rDNS, DMARC aligns, I’ve even configured MTA-STS. The IPs aren’t particularly warm either.

[dexwiz]

I dunno who has your email but I’ve had a gmail account for 15+ years and never had a serious spam issue. The promotions and social folder system also seems to be highly accurate when filtering social media updates and clear ads out of my main inbox.

[bawolff]

At the same time, i've used sendmail on my laptop to send an email to myself as a test and it somehow ended up in my inbox on gmail.

[lrem]

I don’t have the patience for any of this. But a friend has and I sometimes use the email service of their small company. Hosted out of a cellar, their own IP block, servers maintained as a side responsibility of an employee. Can’t remember Gmail ever rejecting email from there.