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Comment by codexon | Hacker News Reader

Why is everyone complaining about taxes being regulatory capture when email is becoming also becoming a monopoly?

It is literally impossible to start up your own email server now and have it accepted by major email hosts like microsoft and gmail now without your emails ending up in spam or even worse, completely dropped.

People should be asking why email is so broken that companies like mailchimp exist and is being bought for billions.

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> It is literally impossible to start up your own email server now and have it accepted by major email hosts like microsoft and gmail now without your emails ending up in spam or even worse, completely dropped.

I am 100% ignorant on the subject. If you have a moment can you provide the 30k foot view of what has changed to make this the case?

The view is that most emails are becoming centralized to come from a few places. So email hosts like microsoft and google take shortcuts to stop spam by untrusting any IP they haven't seen sending emails for 5 years (this is just a random number, no one knows what the real filters are).

I work in a company that sends millions of emails every month through our own server. We moved to new IPs last year and didn't see a big disruption. The key is having a high quality list and only ever sending things that people actually asked you to send.

codexon did a pretty good job but it's little more: the three main consumer email providers/hosters (google, microsoft, and yahoo/aol) don't have a great way to fight spam so use IP reputation, what this means is that if the IP address that you use to host your email server doesn't have a good reputation they will silently drop emails you send to their users and neither the recipients nor the senders (you) will ever know.

Only real way around this is to instead host your email server with them, aka Office365 or gWorkspace. This basically breaks the federated aspect of email and turns it into a siloed SaaS offering from two of the big cloud providers. AWS can also be used to send newsletters but doesn't really do consumer email hosting (they don't have a good client), and you're still tied to a SaaS cloud provider.

I'm not sure if anything has changed in the last two years after is stopped self hosting email but I ran my own server for 6 years and never had any issues with ending up in spam.

If you ran an email server 8 years ago your ip would have accrued enough reputation to bypass filters. It also seems to depend on how much email you send.

Downvote me, I don't care, but I'm just replying to this in the hope that it gets highlighted even more than a simple upvote.

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