Comment by leepowers | Hacker News Reader

Comment by leepowers | Hacker News Reader

Email is hard across time. Meaning yes, I can setup a mail server, and yes I can configure DKIM+SPF, and yes I can initially get good delivery to all the major providers. But that's just the beginning. Email is an ongoing maintenance responsibility. And problems with mail delivery are almost always an emergency for yourself or your clients.

Nothing quite matches the gut punch of being on time for a deadline then having to push it back to troubleshoot mail problems. Or losing a weekend because while you know enough to get started your experience isn't deep enough to fix deliverability problems in a timely manner.

> I work on an opensource SMTP server. I build both opensource and proprietary solutions related to mail. I will likely open a commercial mail service next year.

Translation:

"I am an intelligent guy who works hard. My entire professional career is devoted to designing and maintaining mail systems. I work full time to achieve mastery of my craft. Yet I can't understand why people outside my specialization might find it difficult to do my job."

Email _is_ hard. That's why I'm very happy to outsource mail to experts like OP.

I don't agree with you. I run many, many small email setups and some rather large ones. I am based in the UK.

The only thing that gets mail dropped big style these days, in my experience, is the saddest one: Reverse DNS entries, ie not getting PTR registered. This anachronism still seems to be a fixation by everyone.

Content checkers seem to be pretty decent these days. My fav. is rspamd nowadays with Exim on the front. I generally wind back from doing anything fancy and leave it to defaults. Even more bizarrely, I do add a domain blacklist for all return addresses. As you know email addresses are easily fakeable but the semi legit spammers do stick to a list of domains and hence can be dropped with a few rules. They will go away after a while.

>Email is an ongoing maintenance responsibility.

True, but it is generally fairly minimal.

> True, but it is generally fairly minimal.

That's actually kind of the problem. It's the same thing with phone systems. Any IT person worth a shit can follow a decent tutorial and end up with a system that works. Until it doesn't.

What happens when it doesn't is the issue. For a lot of businesses this will be an immediate critical problem. This is not a great time to be learning by experimentation.

If these services are not critical then go nuts, but if your business depends on these services you really want to have someone whose full time job it is to run them. If your business is not large enough to support having a person's primary role be administering these systems you should really have a third party vendor do it for you.

The article is right, you don't have to use one of the big names, but most of the time it's not a good idea to run your own if you consider email to be a critical service.

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