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Comment by maccard | Hacker News Reader

This is why I don't run my own email server. This stuff is table stakes for email services, and there is no leeway for getting any of it wrong, otherwise your mail doesn't send (and you don't get notfied)

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On the other hand. Mail delivery services like Mailchimp and Sendgrid often see blocks of their IP address spaces ending up in IP blacklists because their services are prone to temporary abuse by bad actors. So even if you get a personal IP address on the service it might be blocked. At that point you still need to take manual action. Some spam list distributors are borderline extortive in nature and will demand a fee to remove you from such a blacklist, and might not even consider removing you if you are using a specific third party SMTP relay service.

I guess mail delivery is just hard regardless of whether you are hosting it yourself or using a commercial relay service.

start a server with static ip and start ip warming! Send email only for your purpose. That is the only way to send email now days.

Not all IPs are equal. I run two separate email servers which are almost identically set up. One for my business and one for my personal use, both with negligible outgoing email traffic (less than 50 emails a day). My business server is with a quality ISP who cares about their network and deliverability is fine. The other, for my personal use, is on a cheapo VPS provider and the IP gets blacklisted enough because of neighboring IPs in the /24 sending spam that I now relay all of my emails through Sendgrid in order to get any kind of reasonable deliverability.

I think this is good advice. The overhead in operations to host and maintain a custom setup is non-negligible, but at least you might get better delivery rates. One of the annoying things about the commercial relays is that the reported delivery rates can't be trusted as they are based on the receiving server actually reporting accurate responses. In lots of cases the receiving server, if suspecting a spam email, will just report that they received the email and then pass it straight into the proverbial shredder.

So while a relay might say you have 99% delivery rate, the actual number might be closer to 90% and you would never know unless your customers complain about missing emails.

MTAs are only one part of the email deliverability trauma.

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