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Comment by mcbits | Hacker News Reader

> Said that it was because my mailserver did not send enough legitimate mail for their algorithm to trust it.

In other words, a small self-hosted email server will be considered a spammer until it starts sending out large amounts of email? Maybe that can be automated...

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In theory it would be simple to provide a "cloudworkers cooperative" kind of service that just bundles the outbound mail so that traffic is sufficiently large to be whitelisted by the big providers. The two biggest problems are A. Scaling up sufficiently without attracting Spammers. Because even a single Spammer can ruin your reputation forever. So ideally you'd have a tight knit group of friends or similar. Even then you could hardly assure than no one ever gets hacked. B. Edge Cases. Even if your US or West European Traffic is sufficient to be whitelisted by all major Providers, how do you ensure that the occasional Email to a customer of an Indonesian ISP does not get blocked by their provider...

Yeah SMTP relaying is quite common. The problem is due to email architecture, to my knowledge, that same relay is going to be able to read your incoming emails because remote servers will block emails from user@endserver.org sent from relay.net unless endserver.org has MX entries pointing to relay.net.

That is less the case today. Back before SPF, absolutely. Today, with properly configured SPF records, not so much.

'large amounts' is also pretty relative, I'm sure if you had a small team of 10-25 employees on a self-hosted mail server (preferably with a static IP via the ISP) you'd be taken seriously pretty quickly versus only you sending an email once a week or less.

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