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Comment by 2Gkashmiri | Hacker News Reader

i self host email now. for the past 3 years. It's been relatively painless experience so i can only sing praises.

The idea that "as the webmaster of the email server, i could get a notice and i can conveniently, confidently say "fuck off" sounds fun".

This isn't about protecting pedos or serious bad people but dmca nonsense or such "legal requests" that you are confident you can say no.

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For a very long time I saw articles on self hosting, where people complain that their emails are filtered out by big providers and it is no longer feasible. How do you deal with this part?

yes. i will give you my personal experience from 3 years ago and last month.

3 years ago:

gmail/outlook was an ass. They marked all emails as spam. I had to call recipients to check spam and mark as not spam. this was on-off for the first few months. then things went good on their own. They would mark spam initially all emails, then emails with attachments then once marked as not spam, things got better.

today i have 0 issues in outgoing email. funnily, i have a website that sends me emails and there is some unknown problem on "receiving emails". just one website so haven't had much look into it.

last month: followed the same setup and gmail/outlook made no complaints. this was surprising to me as i deliberately sent attachments but nothing.

one thing to note. i once send 15-20 mails in bulk (not cc/bcc but separate) at once and that triggered some spam response. marked as not spam fixed it though on recipient side.

both times i used mailinabox and a cheap vps from lowendbox deals. racknerd or something on offer.

takes 1 hour almost from domain/vps purchase to full setup and sending emails. backup on backblaze b2.

takes 5 minutes every 6 odd months to update the software but that's about it.

I recently set up my own self-hosted email solution again and made sure to do all of these things:

    * Proper A and MX record set up in DNS per SMTP standards
    * Proper SPF record in DNS
    * Proper DMARC record in DNS
    * Proper DKIM record in DNS
    * SMTP server (postfix) is not configured as an open relay
    * SMTP server is configured with a DKIM milter to sign outgoing messages

I used basic guides for the DMARC/DKIM stuff since that was new to me and tested with a Gmail account. The first few messages were marked as spam but I was able to unmark them. Once I was able to verify a correct SMTP setup, after two or three unmarkings, all messages were just delivered normally and no longer marked as spam. Google will even email you a report to help debug issues if your DMARC record is set up for it.

As far as I know this is about the best you can do. Everything else is pretty much getting your mail server IP addresses removed from various blacklists which can be easy to impossible depending on the service. The other option would be to forward to another service that allows relaying and has IP addresses with better spam scores but I personally prefer to avoid that.

Choose a host that is not lax on spammers and guard your IP well. Don't use something with a fast moving shared IP pool like a vm. A dedicated server is best.

Do not bring your server up without securing the email setup and setting up essentially useless things like DKIM, SPF (and DMARC). Large providers want to see those.

If you get into a block list, know quickly and fix quickly.

Use a well established domain suffix like .com. The cheap vanity ones are usually blocked more.

If you need software recommendations, there is nothing Postfix+Dovecot cannot do.

The easiest way is to use an SMTP service like smtp2go to send the emails but I am not sure if it invalidates the point (you still host the email server, just not the SMTP side).

this is useful for doing mailing lists delivery and other mass email stuff. for regular office/personal use, self-hosted email works fine

I run my own self-hosted email server for the last 15 years but I had to move to this hybrid system recently because Microsoft (outlook.com, hotmail.com, etc) blocked all the IPs of my hosting company. It is a shame but there's no point appealing (which I tried anyway). So it may or may not work, it depends on luck mostly.

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