Is it possible to run own SMTP server these days and send emails successfully? I thought GMail will classify it as spam. How do you tell the big email providers to not classify email originating from personal domain as spam?
I use separate sender domains for a newsletter than for transactional mail.
You can monitor reputation with Gmail and Outlook postmaster tools, and there are various sites that will mass query RBLs; worth checking occasionally. I have a monthly reminder in the calendar. Sign up for the JMRP and SNDS.
Then just behave like a responsible sender. Don’t send unsolicited mail. Make it easy to unsubscribe, with RFC8085 headers and easily found unsubscribe links. Honour unsubscribes instantly. Honour spam reports instantly with a suppression list. Make the first statement of your communication one that describes the purpose; the second, the unsubscribe link. Make it easier, both functionally and emotionally, for recipients to unsubscribe rather than to report you as junk.
Run your emails through SpamAssassin before sending, and respect and understand the scoring. Read the Gmail sender guidelines (https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126), they are good advice.
Include a plain text part.
Do not trust anyone claiming you can pay to improve reputation. That is snake oil.
GMail is arbitrarily blocking ip addresses or subnets and there's nothing you can do about it.
One year ago I've purchased a VPS with a clean IP address (checked against all DNSBLs), set up mail server with SMTP and IMAP server, set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC and was able to successfully send emails to Gmail for 3 months.
After 3 months GMail stopped accepting mail from my server saying that my ip address was used to send spam. I'm pretty much sure it wasn't me. My VPS OS and mail server are up to date, there was no suspicious activity in the logs, so it's very unlikely that I was hacked.
There're only three possible explanations for it: 1. My VPS was hacked indeed 2. Some bad guy from the same IP network sent spam (although GMail error message specifically states that spam was sent by this exact IP address, not an address from the same network). 3. GMail just randomly blocks access to any little guy trying to setup independent mail server just because they can.
I'll never know the truth but it was very disappointing experience. Also, lost couple of semi-important emails this way.
This is the most likely situation. If a VPS provider is sufficiently cheap, it will attract the wrong people, who will then get the entire VPS provider's IP blocks blacklisted.
It's a shame, but it's the reality. There are lots of discussions around this subject on various mailing lists, where people from the likes of Gmail have chimed in stating as much.
I would reckon it takes as little as 10% of the addresses in a /24 (so ~25 IPs) to get that entire netblock blacklisted.
If you want a higher probability of clean IPs, you need to be using a provider that is sufficiently expensive to not attract spammers.
Either that, or you need your own IPs.
Or just use IPv6, which will probably fix this.
It’s no surprise that Gmail et al are more interested in sender domain reputation, and also the graph of related domains, than they were a few years ago.
I've been running mail servers on OVH (which is known to be a cheap host) for years and I successfully deliver to GMail and other providers without any issues. I'm pretty sure delivering over IPv6 also helps a lot since spammers will never bother setting that up.
Association extends to sharing an IP allocation. It may even extend to sharing a nameserver. Gmail isn’t randomly targeting a “little guy” for the Internet Death Penalty. This isn’t arbitrary, and an entitled victim mindset isn’t going to get your email delivered.
Like I said, prefer IPv6. For now at least, bad senders don’t choose it. That’s the something you can do about it. Pro tip: most VPS services are a swamp.
Incidentally, if your server was rooted, don’t assume that this would show up in the mail logs. There are plenty other ways to use a compromised host as an open relay, including lying to your admin tools.
Ultimately, I think that if you’re unwilling or unable to run a MTA to the maximum level of reputation, then skip doing so, and use Postmark instead.
# --------------------------------------------------------------
# Enabling DKIM ...
# --------------------------------------------------------------
echo DKIM_CANON = relaxed >> /etc/exim4/exim4.conf.localmacros
echo DKIM_SELECTOR = s1 >> /etc/exim4/exim4.conf.localmacros
echo DKIM_DOMAIN = $(FQDN) >> /etc/exim4/exim4.conf.localmacros
echo DKIM_PRIVATE_KEY = /etc/exim4/exim.key >> /etc/exim4/exim4.conf.localmacros
openssl pkey -in /etc/exim4/exim.key -pubout -outform DER | base64 -w 0 > /tmp/publickey
# --------------------------------------------------------------
# Generating DNS records ...
# --------------------------------------------------------------
@echo "Add the following TXT records to DNS:"
@echo
@echo "@ TXT v=spf1 mx -all"
@echo "s1._domainkey TXT p=$$(cat /tmp/publickey)"
@echo "_dmarc TXT v=DMARC1; p=reject; adkim=s; aspf=s"
[1]: https://github.com/susam/susam.in/blob/7cff99b/mta/Makefile#...
[2]: https://github.com/susam/susam.in/blob/7cff99b/mta/Makefile#...
I've never had occasion to send to yahoo mail, but recently sent a test message to an account I had there. Yahoo said it was spam. I marked it as not spam.
After that, sending to yahoo was fine.
I also had never sent to outlook mail. I made an account and tried sending mail from my domain. It went to the spam folder. I told outlook it was not spam.
Tried another message...still spam. Told it that it was not.
I think I'm up to 10 or so such messages now, and outlook is still saying they are spam.
Fixing a couple of things like that (add/update a SPF record, setup reverse DNS for IPv4 & IPv6) and mail was successfully delivered to gmail.
Biggest pain there is that some virtual-machine providers don't let you change RDNS for IPv6 addresses (e.g. scaleway). So you get the choice of disabling it, or changing provider.
My IP range is on a blacklist and it won't come off.
Still doesn't seem to stop them randomly flagging emails as spam, sometimes mid email chain.
The MS support team are also responsive in my experience.
GMail does not classify an "own email server" as source of spam. Quite apart from anything else how would it know it's an "own email server" as opposed to some companies email server or even a distro email server. They all user the same code.
To get your email server classified as a spammer you have to send spam (mostly). That won't happen if it is just forwarding emails you create, but if it is the work horse behind an email list server or something most of what the list will see is spam and not relaying that to GMail or something becomes very hard indeed.
The reason for the (mostly) above is occasionally somebody will have finger trouble and mark some good email coming for your server as spam. As it happens GMail seems fairly immune to this problem. I guess they must need quite a few people to do make it before it kicks in. Microsoft's servers seem to make the mistake occasionally, and some middle wear boxes can be bloody horrible about it. Fortunately they all seem to provide web pages to fix their mistake you just have to find it.
FWIW, I agree was a problem years ago. I suspect it isn't now because ISP's can not longer say what an IP Address is used for, or maybe it's because the DU in that RBL's name stands for Dial Up and this is 2020, not 1999. There is one caveat: you do have to get the DNS PTR records set up.