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Comment by brenden2 | Hacker News Reader

That's only true if you're spamming people a lot. Running your own postfix server is trivial, and you'll have a fine reputation so long as you aren't sending marketing BS.

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Unfortunately, this is the total opposite of my experience. I've never sent any spam from my domains and yet Gmail refused constantly to let any of my emails through regardless of my VPS provider, my DKIM/SPF setup and so on. The _only_ way I could solve it is by letting my email be managed by some other email service provider (I went with Zoho but I don't think it matters).

Running own SMTP server for personal use is hard. Google is the worst adversary just because of their market share.

I have a mail server for personal use, and I send less than 10 mails per day for many years. DKIM, SPF, DMARC are all properly set up. I am signed up to all possible postmaster tools, including that of Google.

Still, Google started blocking mail sent from my IPv6 address in December. I switched to IPv4, and it fixed the issues for existing gmail recipients, but new recipients usually see my mail in Spam. When I don't get a reply for a few days, I mail them from my backup @gmail.com account and ask to unmark me as spam and add to contacts. So far, this helps.

P.S. I also run a community website on a different domain and IP. It sends tens of thousands of notification emails per month, and it fares better in Google Postmaster Tools. User-reported spam is within 1% and it seems that this is acceptable behaviour for Google.

My current impression is that Gmail is sort of broken in general. There isn't really anything you can do to insure that an email will get delivered to Gmail with 100% certainty.

Presumably people who actually care would not be on a free email service in the first place...

> DKIM, SPF, DMARC are all properly set up.

Does the IPv6 address have matching forward/reverse DNS?

Yes

This isn't true. When running my own server Google will send me emails but will not allow me send emails to my Gmail account. I know it is configured properly because I can email other services just fine.

I found many servers will block you if you first send them email (e.g. greylisting). If you can get them to send you an email first, then everything tends to work from then on.

Kinda two use cases here with my being more on the business side than personal, that's true. You may be right for small personal scenarios.

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