If 99% of contacts you want to send mail to are on google/yahoo/microsoft you have to play by their rules. And those rules are effectively "send mail internally or gtfo".
If 99% of contacts you want to send mail to are on google/yahoo/microsoft you have to play by their rules. And those rules are effectively "send mail internally or gtfo".
I think maybe once in the last 3 years I ended up in someone’s spam box, total. In fact I just sent to a new gmail address and to a university I have never contacted before this week and both were delivered without issue.
Setting up DKIM/SPF/etc isn’t that hard and it’s fairly easy to verify with existing tools FYI.
Personally, I'm hesitant because I don't know if the end of all my effort will be constant blacklisting. If I could be confident that if I do it right I won't get blacklisted, I probably would.
Now most of them do not actually enforce it unless you become a problem, but most of them do put active measures on the network to stop SMTP Servers
For example here is a Exerpt from Comcast AUP prohibiting email and web hosting [1]
>>>use or run dedicated, stand-alone equipment or servers from the Premises that provide network content or any other services to anyone outside of your Premises local area network (“Premises LAN”), also commonly referred to as public services or servers. Examples of prohibited equipment and servers include, but are not limited to, email, web hosting, file sharing, and proxy services and servers;
[1] https://www.xfinity.com/corporate/customers/policies/highspe...
Why? Google Fiber is Available to less than 1% of US Households. Comcast is the largest Residential ISP last I looked in about 60-70% of US Markets...
ATT has the same policy, and I believe most of the other Cable Providers do as well. My guess would be over 90% of Residential Internet Plans today have a policy inline with Comcast not Google Fiber
Pointing to an outlier to the norm does not mean i need to update my worldview at all.
I looked for market share info on Google Fiber but was unable to find it. Mind sharing your source?
I was happy to move hosts to one that was considered trusted, but there was no way for me to know the IPv4 addresses the company had in the past, never mind if they'd been on a pertinent blacklist at some time.
Based on that I think it could work, but there are no guarantees that outside, historical characteristics won't screw things up for you.
The people that say "I Cant send anything" are likely trying to setup it up on a Residential or "Business" (which is really just a Residential with a slightly better SLA and less overselling) Internet Circuit... Not an Enterprise Internet Circuit
Hint: If they are trying to bundle TV Services with your Internet you are not on an Enterprise Line.
Even if you buy a dedicated IP from these services they still make is hard to impossible to send email on the circuit
Spam is an interesting problem. Assuming one self-hosts and makes their email address publicly available, then one can get a metric for how much spam is flying around. Eventually one will try to stop spam from coming to their inbox, and on doing so one might build a mental model for how the big mail providers combat spam and realize why one's emails are not being delivered. Then one might realize that one is sending mail that one would not willingly receive! And then take action to resolve.
In general though, there is some base effort to establish trust, and as long as you don't ruin it by sending spam, then you shouldn't end up on a blacklist. If you find that your IP was on a blacklist before it became yours, then work with the people that are blacklisting - but at that point it does become a bit of a job. I actually ran into an issue in my professional life where an AWS WAF rule started alerting on one of our own servers hosted in AWS because someone had previously used the IP for malware C&C.
Anyway - I will think on this and see if I can write something up. It's a good idea. My main concern is that there is a gap between the way I did things (sysadmin style) and the "new" way of doing things (containerized).
The issue people have trying to send mail is with the latter, where the email won't even show up in the spam filters, it will either be blocked by the mail system or silently ignored.
On my server, when I block a message due to trust, I reject the connection. When I block due to spam, the message is received but goes in the spam folder.
I get reports from Google/Microsoft/etc when other people try to send using my domains but their messages fail due to DKIM/SPF failures.
I just want to push back against the “it’s impossible to self host email” meme that seems comes around occasionally. Every time I’ve run into an issue there has been a solution.
Is that how Google/Microsoft/etc. do it too? If not, then your practice really doesn't matter. Most of my friends have an @gmail.com address, so if Google would pretend to accept mail from my hypothetical mail server, but instead just drop it on the floor, that's a non-starter for me hosting my own mail.
What I would like to get across is that self hosting is not impossible or unacceptably unreliable. If Google and Microsoft have policies that make it difficult to send messages to gmail or hotmail users, that isn’t a reason in and of itself that we should not self host. It’s a reason that we should work with Google/Microsoft to have better policies - but accepting things as they are and writing off self hosting as impossible is eventually accepting control of email by a limited handful of corporations, which I don’t think is a good thing.
Maybe thats why it works for you. Try making new one?
But...I've also been in the unfortunate position of leasing IPv4 addresses which were already blacklisted by various sources. It's not a terribly easy problem to solve if you need to contact customers NOW without using a 3rd party solution.
I recently made a presentation that has a full explanation of the techniques, why they exist and how they work, on Hetzner Cloud (from the original post):
https://nh2.me/recent/Running-your-own-mailserver.pdf
I find it very easy to configure with simple-nixos-mailserver (much easier than the manual setup on Ubuntu that I ran the years before):
https://gist.github.com/nh2/6814728dc3bea1508323e9bf2213c28d
Unless you have a Commercial Line that has be specifically designated for hosting content then it is likely any IP you are issued is added to Google/Microsoft/etc Blacklist by the ISP. Most of them clearly spell out in their terms that running a Mail Server on the circuit is forbidden.