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Comment by tomgs | Hacker News Reader

Love the intro to self-hosting your email, but aren't you going to be flagged as spam by the main providers anyhow?

If, by “self-host” you mean “hosted by the cheapest VPS I could find, using an IP address range from the wrong side of the metaphorical rail road tracks”, then yes. If by “self-host” you mean “hosted by myself in a server rack in my house, possibly using a VPN to a respected IP connectivity provider”, then no.

Actually, I have tested sending mail to Gmail or other Mail Service Provider, and have not found any one flagged my email as spam.

You can partially mitigate it by making sure DMARC, DKIM, and SPF are configured right. There are tools online you can use to verify they're setup right, don't remember which sites though.

I have used mxtoolbox.com in the past. However, I don't know how reputed they are.

Note that the 'big mail providers' won't accept your mails even after you apply every known trick in the book. This is especially true for the two biggest ones that provide free services and hosted services on customers domains.

Just off the top of my head, I would suggest using the “Test your email” tool at <https://internet.nl/> for testing incoming e-mail, and <https://www.learndmarc.com/> and <https://www.mail-tester.com/> for testing sending e-mail.

I would also suggest https://www.email-security-scans.org/ for testing outgoing emails.

Others for testing outgoing e-mail which I have saved, but don’t regularly use:

• <https://www.checktls.com/TestReceiver>

• <https://www.helloinbox.email/>

• <http://isnotspam.com/>

I’ve had pretty good luck running my own on digital ocean for several years now.

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