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Comment by jaywalk | Hacker News Reader

Self-hosting is great, but self-hosting email is generally nothing but a world of hurt. That's the one thing I would always leave to an established company.

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Agreed, I self hosted for many years and eventually gave it up. Maintaining high IP trust is tricky.

A fun hack is to run a captcha-free fake forum and allow random bot signups to generate outbound mail volume and trust.

I imagine this could backfire if you get reported as spam by people who's email addresses bots have used.

Been self hosting email since 2000. Very little maintenance. I lower risk by having less than 5 actual accounts, and of course normal anti spam measures.

How many of your outgoing messages actually make it through to the intended recipient?

This. I self-hosted from the mid-90s until giving up in 2017. My outgoing email was increasingly black-holed by major email providers. I eventually accepted that I would either have to give up on email or pay for hosting. At some level this feels like paying protection money, but there are a lot of things about the internet that don't match up very well with 90s idealism.

I haven't had any issues that I've noticed. Sending to gmail for example is issue free. Maybe I am lucky?

My experience as well. Self host email if you want most of your messages to end up in spam...that's even if your ISP allows a self-hosted email server on their network. Read the fine print first.

But pretty much everything else is super fun to self-host, especially if you get comfortable with docker and reverse proxies like nginx.

Nah, that’s FUD. I had a pretty easy time setting it up myself. You only have to setup SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Which is pretty easy by itself. You even have online services to check that you have set it up everything correctly.

That’s just where you’re getting started. The biggest hurdle is you have no reputation (or worse, you’re on a shared provider giving you negative reputation to start), and you have no good way to build that up as an individual person, and no good way to debug/appeal each case as your emails get rejected as possible spam.

I’m on hetzner. My IP address was in some dnsrbl lists. I appealed and got my ip clean. Now I can send emails to gmail and outlook and they arrive successfully. I don’t see where all this fuss comes. You set up your server according to google and you are good to go. That’s all.

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