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Comment by khimaros | Hacker News Reader

hetzner allows outbound smtp by request. the process is relatively painless and quick.

Yes, but the process of getting Gmail, Outlook etc to receive your emails and put them in recipients' inboxes is far from painless or quick. An IP address with a clean history and SPF/DKIM/DMARC are table stakes, but then you get to play the "my emails are randomly dropped today while everything looked fine yesterday" game.

Anecdotally, we have hosted email servers for old games on Hetzner without issue, as the IP pool is generally not as popular with spammers given the time cost bringing up the server OS images. It is far from perfect, but generally performs well as reporting asshats on your local network block is easy.

Almost all cloud providers with dynamic-load ephemeral IPs will show up on ban lists eventually due to vulnerability scanners, bad spiders, and spam/voip drops. However, it is far more common for Spamhaus free tiers to quietly go sideways when no one is looking.

Gmail/Outlook have their own peer policies that serve their own business posture. Google does require administrators register in their clown system as a user to exchange email, but it is effective policy that adds nuisance cost to people spinning up 30 servers a day to spam people.

Firewall Rate-limits are effective on small single-domain servers. A modern email server in Go that is isolated from each user space greatly simplifies the possible setups. =3

At 15+ years of hosting my own email through multiple IP changes this has not been my experience at all. Hosting your own legit email works fine.

OK, well it hasn't been MY experience at all, hosting your own legit email with a 100% score on mail-tester, SPF, DKIM and DMARC does NOT work fine because Microsoft still ends up marking all your emails as spam, so maybe you could consider your experience is not universal and just because it happens to work with your IP addresses doesn't mean that's the case for everyone else? Jeez...

No one is “right”.

My experience is that Gmail accepted my emails fine... until one day it didn't. Then some time later it worked again.

I registered for their Postmaster Tools, which says

    No data to display at this time. Please come back later.
    Postmaster Tools requires that your domain satisfies certain conditions before
    data is visible for this chart. 
    Refer to the help page for more details.

The help page has no useful information. I suspect that I sent too little mail for it to register in their systems at all.

Outlook was even worse, and I just told my Outlook users to change providers.

Eventually I capitulated and got Google Workspace, and now everything gets delivered perfectly.

15+ years hosting email on the same ip space with strict security process. Numerous numerous numerous blocks, black holes, and spam routing. This was personal.

Worked for a company self hosting famous brand emails. They would get blocked too. Imagine telling the band manager of a famous classic rock band that their email to their label was being rejected due to being black listed for spam.. (cc’ing the managers team)

Stop fooling yourself, it does not work fine. If it did you would not rely on that google outlook or yahoo account

Perhaps you're replying to another comment.

That's commercial email. Of course you get flagged for spam. Use a service for that kind of thing.

Personal/private/family email can be easily self-hosted. You just need to know a few things to get it set up properly.

> At 15+ years of hosting my own email through multiple IP changes this has not been my experience at all.

At 25+ years of hosting email through multiple hosting providers, this has been my experience multiple times. To be fair, happening less often with DKIM et al, but those are relatively new inventions.

EDIT time is over. I don't want to be misunderstood. I am not claiming to send MASS emails and having them delivered without issues or anything. If we have to do mass emails, they are done with services that provide the GUIs for them etc. There's no way you won't end up in spam lists even if you sign up each invidiual email address in person yourself.

That's true sending email from my MS Outlook box to my own gmail. At some point, it comes down to just doing the best you can and not stressing too hard.

Getting a dedicated server with an ISP that does a decent job at keeping their IP blocks clean for email is about the best you can expect. Setup the appropriate SPF/DKIM/DMARC and get along. There's really not too much more to be done these days. Even the big guys don't always get along.

Follow the mox quickstart instructions and you might be surprised how successful and maintenance free it is.

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