Hacker News Reader

Comment by tambre | Hacker News Reader

A big caveat not mentioned for Digital Ocean is that they blackhole IPv6 email traffic. It took a while for me to figure out why it wasn't working since it wasn't documented in their documentation and there was no ICMPv6 response indicating this. Moved to Linode after that.

I wonder if the same caveat applies to other providers that have improperly implemented IPv6 by not providing a /64.

View on HN

I don't agree with their policy, but it is difficult these days to run your own outbound mail service and not end up in the spam box.

I gave up and pay for Gsuite as an SMTP smarthost so my outbound email isn't tagged as spam. That allows me to still process the inbound on my server if I want.

Obviously doesn't help the privacy concern if that is your motivation for running your own SMTP.

If, however, cost is a consideration, Yandex is an option. They will host SMTP for your domain at no charge. https://yandex.com/support/connect/add-domain.html (assuming Russian hosting is okay for you)

Been running my mail server on Linode for almost 2 years now. Fortunately I've yet to run in any issues. Having setup all the stuff properly from day 1 probably helps (TLS, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, MTA-STS).

Do you send a fair amount of email? Where I had trouble was running an ecom site. We set up all the things you mention correctly. We never sent any unsolicited email, but I assume people might occasionally flag a receipt or password reset as spam, and then it was game over for our email getting delivered. No issues since switching to gSuite.

Personal email server so I only send a small amount. Sometimes a few emails per day, some weeks only 1.

Did the outgoing emails for the site ramp up fast? Did you only encounter issues with Gmail or with other big providers too?

It was a slow ramp. Issues with Gmail, o365, and others.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com