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Comment by ishandotpage | Hacker News Reader

The corporates are pretty good at keeping self hosters emails out of their user's inboxes citing "Spam"

This certainly seems to be the consensus about self hosting email, but but I'm now convinced otherwise.

I send a couple newsletters (one tech related, other for marketing for a coffee shop/bakery I own), and it was fairly easy to land on inboxes. Now, I don't know with a 100% certainty that they were delivered, but if DMARC records and bounces are anything to go by, self hosted emails aren't all that hard.

When you buy a VPS, it helps to check if the IP you receive is already blacklisted. After that, it's easy to use some outside service to monitor DMARC responses and blacklist. There are about 40 black list databases. My domains and the IP address are on none of them.

You can self host and reach inboxes. You just have to have all of the optional headers/dns stuff set up, and have a domain and IP address in good reputation. Probably also having the whole block in good reputation.

Realistically an absolute fuckload of spam and not a lot of genuine email comes out of residential and cheap VPS hosts IPs so they already have a negative rep.

That sort of work but not all the time, your messages still end up in spam a lot when trying to reach somebody you haven't exchanged email with before.

I do self host. You have to have all DNS markers set right and DKIM working right, but that isn't complicated really.

The good reputation IP range is the biggest problem. I have a more expensive ISP at home that takes its network seriously, so I look more like a commercial interest in that regard. There are decent services that will act as relay for you and probably cost less than such an ISP (or a similarly more expensive VPS provider that takes priority care of related things) if outgoing SMTP is your main reason for considering one.

One pragmatic solution to this is to use an email relay service to handle the outbound mail. Now, the hair-shirt self hoster's response to this idea might be, "But that means trusting a third party!" And indeed it does. But as the parent comment points out, in the vast general case we're committed to trusting whichever third parties our correspondent uses (or finding alternive means of communication.)

That might change now Europeans have a stick called DSA & DMA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Services_Act

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