As mentioned last week here in a previous “run your own email” story, your setup can also get rejected for not sending enough email, meaning your volume can’t establish good reputation.
Most providers do not mandate a strong SSL only imap system.
Along with other similar caveats, do not depend on your mail system to keep your emails private.
If you want privacy, encrypt your emails yourself.
Also most people who selfhost their email usually do not encrypt data at rest. As its not the default norm. As such anyone having access to your disk can compromise you at anytime too (especially likely if you’re using a vps).
So, unless youre encrypting your emails yourself E2E. Assume you have no privacy. If you’re doing E2E, aws cannot decrypt your mails anyways.
Besides, metadata is probably already more significant than the message contents and encrypyion solves nilch there.
Aws ses has this offer where for a few thousand emails per month, email sending is free.
The steps are this:
1- Signup for aws ses, once you do that they’ll put you in a sandbox environment
2- After that they’ll ask you a few questions on why you need it, just tell them its because you’re a growing startup who expects to send thousands of emails per month, (make sure to say this, they don’t crosscheck later, if you dont say something along the lines of this, they usually reject your application to avoid having to serve small customers who might not scale their business later. )
3- After you’re approved, they provide you with a mail relay api key, just take that api key and attach it to your postfix or other smtpd installation
I use docker-mailserver[0] which packages everything I need for my mailserver into a small container and was good to go, it consumes minimal resources too.
For me, i just had to add the ses relay api key to the config file of my docker-mailserver install and it was all setup.
However you can do the same with any provider that gives you an option to act as your email relay, I remember both aws ses and sendgrid provide this service, but I’m sure there are more niche businesses providing this too.
I have the same setup as you, relaying outbound mails through SES. I told exactly how I was going to use it and was accepted promptly. Maybe I just got lucky.
My solution was to set up SMTP relaying based on the recipient domain. So nearly all my email can still be sent direct, but I have a list of domains that get routed through mailgun.com (or you could use SES or whatever).
More info here: https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver/issue...
This would be me. DO traffic is overwhelmingly hostile traffic. It's like Psychz or MCColo got massively scaled up.
OVH is a close 2nd. Amazon was a solid third, beginning in 2019. Not sure if they still are.
Is there anything I can do to get whitelisted? How can I contact you?
Not a huge deal if not, I've implemented the workaround already. But to be whitelisted after a chance meeting on HN would be a nice way to finish this story.
There was a time when I looked at sending in reports -
and a time when I asked someone in the wp plugin directory who had a detector-like plugin to have it spit out a chunk of fields that would be ready to fill in the amazon complaint form and to do a cidr lookup to port over to iptables.. but that never got made.
This was all made worse when maxmind went registration needed and ruined the most effective security plugin for wordpress I'd been depending on for years.
I've noticed an increase in the microsoft ips I'm blocking these days to.
for now I don't mind doing an ip lookup when I can block 64,000 ips or more at a time I find it's a solid win.
I imagine 99% of outgoing Amazon SES traffic is transactional or marketing email for various online services. I worry this could make my personal emails look more like spam to the big providers. Or maybe it works out fine.
This is in contrast to Microsoft which seems to rely mostly on IP reputation and trying to send from a new server is incredibly difficult as they (reasonably) treat unknown Digital Ocean IPs as likely spam but (unreasonably) don't allow a good domain reputation to override that.
I'm having trouble parsing this. Are you talking about VINs?
Personally, I think the use of proof-of-work like methods can mitigate the problem by a large extent, making it computationally expensive to spam users. This was one of the original goals of what has now become the "blockchain" revolution. Is anyone aware of any projects that are still implementing similar (open) systems?