[embedding-shape]

> It's not easy getting your service white-listed, and even if you do they're still likely back at the spot of going straight to spam when messaging to any US based large provider.

I feel like this point is maybe outdated, or possibly never been right. I've run my own email servers for many years, helped friends setup their own servers too, last time around April this year, and neither of us have this issue that everyone always brings up whenever people start talking about self-hosted email. Is this particular problem something you have personally faced lately, or are you parroting a "known typical problem"?

Make sure you setup all the right DNS records, double-check IPs/domains against spam lists, set the right headers and you're unlikely to have issues here, even when sending emails to large US providers (I've manually tested this with Outlook, AOL and Gmail, neither have these issues).

[mothballed]

I'm not parroting anything. Might be outdated. It is my own experience circa 2010. I could send to other private servers without trouble, sometimes made it to spam in larger providers or sometimes blocked altogether.

I never tried again because it was such an abysmal failure.

[Ghoelian]

I also used to run my own mail server for a good while. I did have some issues with Google rejecting me at first, but they had some admin panel somewhere I had to register my domain, and after that I never had issues again.

[bluGill]

Some of it is luck. I moved to fastmail 15 years ago, so I don't have current experience. However there is plenty of indication that large blocks of IPs get blocked by all the major providers - this is a matter of luck though, most blocks of IPs are not blocked and so you might never have a problem while others can't.

Note that a large part of the problem is if you are blocked there is nothing you can do about it. You can't contact anyone at google to get help.

[nothrabannosir]

Personal experience from mid 2000s to early 2010s. I lost too many outbound emails to the void. Not even spam or bounced; just genuinely gone. Gmail was the only honest receiver, Hotmail and yahoo were particularly egregious. Obviously set up everything: dkim, spf, constant ip blocklist monitoring, etc etc. It got so bad that I started sending follow ups from a Gmail address to ask if they received my email. That’s when I stopped and never tried again.

[sam_lowry_]

I self-hosted for 25 years. My SMTP server is at Hetzner for the last 15 years.

I was probably lucky, but I rarely had delivery problems. The last one was a couple years ago with Microsoft swallowing my emails and it was due to the combination of a fairly old exim and a TLS certificate verification quirk at *.protection.outlook.com. I found a fix in the form of a configuration option somewhere on SO.

I must admit that when I send a really important email, I check the mail server log if it went off without errors, but this does not bother me as checking logs manually once in a while is a good thing anyway.

[yndoendo]

That time period was during my IT consultant days.

We were installing on site Windows Small Business server for them. Issues were rare and one offs with self hosted email. The only issue of delayed messages was during changing IP addresses and DNS records, waiting for the updates to replicate to root servers.

Companies would often have a server just for email hosting running Linux on low power hardware. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_Qube

[6510]

It doesn't seem particularly hard to have [e-mail] mailboxes with lavish storage if money isn't an issue.

[sdoering]

I second this from my experience.