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Comment by dugite-code | Hacker News Reader

> I cannot believe that my IPs are blessed or whatever. My mail systems are behind "business" IPs but nothing more fancy.

The biggest issue is mail volume to establish reputation. You need a fairly high number of emails before Google or Microsoft's email Postmasters tooling even registers you exist. This leaves new servers stuck in a chicken and egg conundrum. You need to send X number of good emails before the emails are excepted, BUT you can't get emails through without having X number of good emails go through. Old servers like yourself have the advantage of already being "trusted" to an extent.

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I ran through the HE IPv6 certification thing back in 2017. It involves setting up email SMTP over IPv6. I used my home connection.

You really don't need volume. You need to do it right by following the rules and also not sending crap out. The likes of mail pig and co will never work as I do ... Americans use the phrase "Mom and Pop" for a small family business - that is what I do.

I have a VM at work that acts as a SMTP/IMAP post office for a few vanity domains. I registered another one a few months ago and added it in for a friend and they have no problems conversing with the hyper scalers etc and nor do I and the rest of my small holders.

This may be an artifact of being in the UK but I doubt it. The big sods are run by people like me - professionals, who try to get the messages through, despite a sea of hate, viruses and the rest.

If you really do SMTP seriously, you will discover a world of people who really care about delivery.

I am not an "old server" per se. I refuse to deliver crap and my peers seem to appreciate that. I own my IT company and I keep a pretty tight rein on my S&M department - they do not get to randomly spam people. Strangely enough we still manage to function and profit without being arseholes that blatt the world with spam.

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This is, apparently, my certificate from HE:

It doesn't change even over time, three years self hosting and I still can't get any of those tools to show anything beyond an error that there's no data available because my personal volume is so low.

I don't know where you got that from, but it's not true. DMARC and DKIM are enough to make you trustworthy.

Multiple sources and over 10 years of email server shenanigans. IP reputation partially due to low mail volume is a very well known issue for mail servers and DMARC and DKIM are definitely not enough. Here is one article that covers it that I quickly pulled up: https://mailtrap.io/blog/email-ip-reputation/

Mail deliver-ability has been discussed multiple times here on hackernews with the poor state of the postmaster tools being explicitly mentioned in the articles. For example Google is eating our mail: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19756125

> Most of the Postmaster Tools dashboards will only display data when there’s a sizable daily volume of email traffic (up to the order of hundreds) coming from your Authentication Domains and/or certain other conditions, in place to prevent abuse.

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/9983020?hl=en_#zippy=...

Postmaster tool links for additional FAQ's:

https://www.gmail.com/postmaster/

https://sendersupport.olc.protection.outlook.com/pm/

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