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by Biganon 260 days ago
I hate the fact that your comment got flagged / greyed out / whatever even though it's perfectly correct. I'm one of those people who had configured everything perfectly. Score of 100 on mail-tester, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, you name it. Examining the headers in an e-mail sent to gmail: pass, pass, pass. Everything green.

Microsoft however? Denied, 100% of the time. Spam folder, or even plain rejected. Why? No idea, they won't say. They redirect you to their shitty partner that you can PAY in order to HOPE you get approved.

I don't know why our experiences are considered "anecdotes", and not the other way round. What's the incentive for big players to accept e-mail from home servers or small dedicated servers? "Sure it could be Standard Nerd from HN running their own stuff for street cred points, or it could be one of the bazillion spam factories sending fake UPS scams. In doubt, let's reject."

2 comments

I add it here so you can successful self-host: You need strict DMARC for Microsoft. If you change the header on your relay DMARC relaxed filters will pass the mail, but not strict.

Because this adds the need to sign every single mail for every single recipient (expensive) its safe to filter for this as a SPAM-Server will sign mail once, then distribute.

That's why your mail is filtered - not because your non-blacklisted IP is the problem or whatever.

>I hate the fact that your comment got flagged / greyed out / whatever even though it's perfectly correct. [...] I don't know why our experiences are considered "anecdotes", and not the other way round.

It's because people who successfully self-host think their situation universally applies to everyone.

Here's another example from 2017 of someone replying to my previous reasonable comment about self-hosting by overconfidently saying I was exaggerating the issues : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15526127

And then 18 months later in 2019, that same person reveals they also got their sent emails rejected by Gmail : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19757607

So they end up solving it by "outsourcing" the outbound email to a relay (SendGrid).

So my comment gets downvoted for explaining what others had to do in the real world.

The following should not be a controversial statement but for some reason it is: Correctly configuring SPF/DKIM/DMARC and getting 100% green score on https://www.mail-tester.com/ for your self-hosted setup ... does not universally mean your outbound email will get accepted by all the services.

Read the logs from Gmail and Microsoft, they will tell you exactly why the mail was filtered. Act on that problem and have your mail appear in inboxes.

It's usually relaxed DMARC triggering Microsoft. Gmail accepts relaxed.