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Comment by the_jeremy | Hacker News Reader

There's also a huge difference between setting up a properly configured server and actually getting things delivered. The big ones (MS, Google) mark your mail as spam even with SPF, DMARC, DKIM and the like. Even on the service I use (purelymail.com) the low volume of mail and the fact that it's less than a year old means that even when I email them first, the replies are sometimes marked as spam.

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Running my own for about 2 years now. Spf dMarc and dkim set it is accepted by all mail providers. I also get daily reports from Google how well it behaves

Same here, except to Charter, who has apparently just blacklisted swaths of DigitalOcean IPs, probably for some reason. So I just can't email my mom. Other than that, a great experience.

> So I just can't email my mom. Other than that, a great experience.

You made the point.

Are you using IPv6 or IPv4 to send the emails? DigitalOcean apparently blocks port 25 outbound IPv6 access because whole ranges are getting blocked.

I'm doing IPv4. The discussion is here: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/is-anybody-...

Except it doesn’t work to send an email to someone who I assume is important to you - “it’s a great experience”.

Isn’t that an argument for why you shouldn’t run your own mail server?

Well I just have to do the one more step of forwarding the SMTP to sendgrid or whatever and then it will be top notch. It hasn't been enough of a pain for me yet to do that next step. I just signal her instead of email.

> Running my own for about 2 years now. Spf dMarc and dkim set it is accepted by all mail providers. I also get daily reports from Google how well it behaves

This is false. The dmarc reports from Google do not actually give you the portion of email that is placed in recipients' spam folder.

"I also get daily reports from Google how well it behaves"

Do you ever read them? If so, how is daily (!) routine maintenance of your email setup not a massive (well, relatively speaking) headache?

As mentioned by another user:

"The dmarc reports from Google do not actually give you the portion of email that is placed in recipients' spam folder."

So it is just about the server and and dns part (the things I as an administrator can control)

Since I configured it in the beginning the reports are all green so I just glance over them. Takes about 10 seconds.

Then again I like to work with infrastructure so your mileage may vary in regard to how much headaches it causes

That's a bug with gmail and those who use gmail should be aware they may be missing emails.

"Yeah, but I don't have this bug for my 200 friends that have Gmail plus you want my business and I like Gmail so it's your problem."

This is both true and irrelevant, because your boss/customer/whatever doesn't care about this story.

The big ones (MS, Google) mark your mail as spam even with SPF, DMARC, DKIM and the like.

This is such a canard. I have almost zero problems delivering to anybody from my closet server, and the only thing that has happened in the last several years was getting notices that AT&T was blocking me. I did a quick relay check and emailed postmaster@. It only took a day or two to get an email saying I was clean to them again, and that was without the DNS security extensions you mention.

Maybe cable modem users are held to a different standard? Dynamic IP addresses? I have DSL with static IPs.

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