Self-Hosting a Blog Mailing List | Hacker News Reader

Self-Hosting a Blog Mailing List

blog.mediocregopher.com

The post already recommends renting a VPS for this. I also recommend that you take care that your mailing list is not in any way connected to your personal mail (don't share the domain in From:, don't share DKIM keys, don't use the same IP as for your personal mail, etc.).

Many people don't fish up the unsubscribe link from the bottom of the mail when they don't want to receive your blog posts anymore. They just click that nice prominent "spam" button in gmail/outlook/their mail client.

It's a super convenient solution for them, but if you have a low-volume mail server and a few people do this to your mailing list it's very easy for your entire domain or the server IP to end up blackholed at Google or Microsoft services. That's ok if it happens to your blog, but if all your personal mail ends up undeliverable it can be a pretty big problem.

Thanks for this tip, I need to do some updating.

if you rent a vps, its very likely your ip range will already be in a spam RBL. i have a single ip address from a /24 that i've used for years, has something like a 98% good sender reputation but i'm still blocked by weird ass domains (last was a university when i was trying to reach out to an intern)

you're better off using sendgrid or aws to send your bulk mail

Downvotes?

A vps is like an EC2 instance, it can be picked up by spammers used until it’s blocked everywhere, then destroy and start again with another. This has the effect of putting the entire /24 into a spam list.

I have been through way too many VPS providers where this was the case. Even with spf and dkim I would still get blackholed randomly. It really takes time to build back reputation, so if you have your own address space it makes good sense to not send any bulk mail from it

Thank you for this tip. If I use a sub-domain for the blog mailer will that dodge the issue? Or do i need to get a whole new domain for the blog mailer?

We really need to fix email, it shouldn't be this hard -_-

I don't know. I guess the more isolation the better. Nobody reveals their exact spam filtering algorithms. My advice is purely based on guesswork (and by chance seeing people doing the "mark as spam" instead of the unsubscribe thing on their computers)

Some years back I got most of personal mail sent from my server randomly rejected by Google. Dropping the blog newsletter was one of the things I did (the other was some fixes to my DKIM/DMARC setup that I think were suggested to me here on HN). I was sending the newsletter from a different server, but used the same DKIM domain and the same domain in From:. It was suggested to me that the newsletter could have been the cause for blacklisting.

The newsletter was strictly opt-in through a form on my page and only had around 10-20 subscribers. It had a hard limit of at most 1 message per week. I think I was running it for around 3 years when I shut it down.

Probably nobody knows what the true reason was, but some time after these changes I was able to send mail to @gmail.com domains again.

Neat project and good blog post. One nitpick, on ios latest the link tags are super light blue against an off-white background. It’s very hard to read them.

I only mention it in case you were unaware.

I was unaware, as i have no iOS devices to test with. Thanks!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com