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Comment by albertgoeswoof | Hacker News Reader

I run a small transactional email provider (https://mailpace.com), our IPs are very rarely added to blocklists- but we are very strict on what we allow through our service, and surprisingly we’ve had no long term delivery issues with any of the big providers.

So thanks to the federated/decentralized design of email, is totally possible to be part of the network without any special privileges.

We are sending millions of emails every day though, which is quite different to sending a couple hundred personal emails a week. If you’re running this on a cloud host, expect to be blocked by default. However if you can find a small vps provider you’ll have better luck on sending yourself.

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Right. When I changed my vps to another hoster, I totally forgot how much trouble it was to get a good reputation in the beginning.

But it was really not that much work again. Just unfortunate, because one big Mail provider just discarded instead of rejecting my mails. After this was settled, everything works quite nice again. Important to me is keeping spf, dkim, dmarc and now also mts up to date. See mail-checker.com e.g.

I still wonder though, why some big mail providers do not do dkim/dmarc? I happen to realize this when I started to fight spam and gave incoming mails without dkim/dmarc a high spam score.

Do you mean a different domain? mail-checker.com Looks like a parked spam domain.

I love https://www.mail-tester.com/

One time, mail-tester.com found that my paid personal email hoster had moved my SMTP server to a new IP address without updating the anti-spam sender mechanisms. (You had one job, people.) When email is how you keep in touch with a lot of friends, and occasionally make new consulting contacts, that's relatively costly.

Oh you are right. Sorry for the fauxpas. It is mail-tester.com as corrected below. Thanks for mentioning

We host in a datacenter and sending from their IPv4 or our own /24 IPv4 block has no issue. We also have the volume to keep things going as well to build up the reputation.

Can I use you as relay to my Postfix for 'regular' emails ?

(Unrelated to the OP - but I've been so frustrated by this for so long that it's worth the [flagged])

A product like this is exactly what I've been looking for with pretty great pricing.

The one thing that this (and most providers) are missing is making email easy to test. I'm about to launch a product where email is critical, and there's no way to send an example email (with a non-test email address) to your service and see that you receive it, without it being sent to the To address.

Better yet, the few providers that do support it charge as if it were a real email, when none of the delivery costs exist on their end (there are infrastructure costs, sure, but there is none of the reputation risk nor need for clean IPs, the reason people use transactional services like these in the first place).

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