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Comment by traceroute66 | Hacker News Reader

> Reasons to not use your own domain for email

Aside from the fact that the author of the blog doesn't really provide any "reasons" in their blog ...

There are ZERO reasons not to use your own domain name for email.

The biggest reason TO use your own domain name is that you are not subject to the corporate whims of your ISP, cloud-email provider or whatever. You get to choose, and you get to choose when to switch.

The only thing you should NOT do is attempt to host your own email server on a home internet connection. Not only do most home ISPs (quite rightly, IMHO) block port 25, but also most home ISP IP ranges are on blocklists.

To make it clear: Nothing wrong with running your on mailserver. Just don't do it on a home internet connection and then bitch and moan about how its not working !

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> The only thing you should NOT do is attempt to host your own email server on a home internet connection.

You can tunnel the relevant ports through a VPS though.

There are quite a few more things that you shouldn't do.

Any VPS that is capable of tunneling SMTP/IMAP ports to your home machine is also capable of simply being your mail server.

Source: Me running mail servers on VPS since they've existed.

Absolutely. Grandparent comment was about running a server at home.

(Among other capabilities, a VPS is capable of being read by your hosting provider or whoever can get them to give access)

What about blacklists? I read that it is a huge problem with custom domains.

Only if you spam. That's why they're called "spam blacklists".

You can spam inadvertently, of course, e. g. if you (or someone else you gave an email on your domain) get pwned. That's problematic.

The issue is still overblown.

Maybe I'm mistaken, but I've read that some blacklists operate on the guilty until proven innocent basis and owner needs to prove that he is legit first, to each blocklist separately. Is it true? I also regularly see comments like "just configure DMARK, and BLA and BLABLA and another ten items, and maintain them up to date forever, and you will be fine". Would I need to learn and do all this if want to use custom domain with some provider like Protonmail or Fastmail?

Services like Fastmail provide clear step-by-step instructions on what you need to configure. Typically you need to add some DNS records (MX, SPF, DMARC, DKIM), and that's it. It sounds way worse than it is and it takes 10 minutes tops if you've never done it before, less if you know what you're doing.

Getting out of blacklists is you email provider's problem, not yours. I've never heard of any domain owner who is not hosting their own server run into this. I can see it happening if you use the same domain for your servers, one of them gets compromised and starts sending lots of spam. So you should probably avoid using your personal domains for your servers, and definitely skip crappy TLDs like .xyz, and you'll be fine:

https://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/tlds/

> Maybe I'm mistaken, but I've read that some blacklists operate on the guilty until proven innocent basis and owner needs to prove that he is legit first, to each blocklist separately.

No, I don't know of any public blocklists that operate that way.

The big providers (msft & goog) have reputation mechanisms though, which can be volatile for a new domain. Getting that reputation to a hard blacklist requires that you genuinely spam, but some early mails may end up in junk folders anyway.

> Would I need to learn and do all this if want to use custom domain with some provider like Protonmail or Fastmail?

No. Your provider will give you instructions on how to set up your DNS records. The last relevant standard is from 2015, it's somewhat unlikely that you'll have to update these things often. Your provider should tell you if anything needs updating.

Hosting your own email system in its entirety out of your domain, i.e. becoming a mail host, does run into this, yes. Primarily around sending issues to other major hosts - you can do it and email yourself / within your domain just fine, but Gmail will probably block your messages.

Using your domain with an established provider has absolutely zero of those issues. That's super simple and works everywhere immediately.

I worried about this before setting up email on my domain, but in the end, it hasn't been a problem yet. And if it ever is, I can just use my gmail account for that thing only. I've already got it forwarding to my new email anyhow, so it doesn't make much difference in the long run.

I've been slowly converting accounts over to the new email for about a year now I think.

It’s typically not domain names that are black listed, but IP addresses of the hosts that are sending the emails. Those are independent.

You can still send through commercial services. My own email is received through Cloudflare (which does forwarding with SRS) and sent via Amazon SES (a paid service, but pennies per month for manual, personal email).

Deliverability and blacklists are their problem.

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