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Comment by fareesh | Hacker News Reader

- Where does one get an affordable server that isn't on a blacklist somewhere?

- What happens when one of the big cloud providers arbitrarily start putting your emails in spam?

Are there solutions to this? It feels like the biggest value provided by "big email" are these two things

Those are the two problems caused by "big email". I've used hetzner, ovh and mythic beasts and had no issue with blacklisted IPs, and if you follow the Mox instructions you will be trusted and shouldn't get put in spam

since a lot of people are sharing anecdotes..

i spent some time today buying a new domain and setting up mox on a hetzner vm. the IP was on 3 blacklists on first check, after fixing the reverse dns it's on 2, one of which is apparently fake? dkim and dmark seem to be working, sending a mail to protonmail succeeds the checks, and yet it lands in spam - however, i'm confident once the domain is older than "just now" and i've set up DNSSEC (takes 1-3 days for this to start working in my country apparently) things will improve.

worst case i'll have to request a blocklist to unblock me, but i'll see.

For your first point, the key is an IP range that isn’t on a blocklist. Pick a very reputable hosting provider (not AWS/GCP/Azure), who has strict no-spam rules, and check out some spam reports from their ranges. Hetzner I’ve heard is good, digitalocean as well, but your mileage may vary.

For your second point, you live with it. I haven’t found a solution, at least. I’ve never landed in spam for corporate offerings (cloud O365, google workspace or whatever they call it now) or (very rare these days) anyone self-hosting with rspamd or equivalent, just regular personal mail (hotmail, gmail, iCloud, etc). That’s usually pretty easy to detect and work around (“hey I sent you an email” “oh I didn’t get it” “did you check your junk?”) Irritating, but not the end of the world.

I’m going to try hosting from my residential IP sometime this year, now that I have sufficient redundancy in terms of power and networking. I don’t know if I’ll have better or worse luck than with hosting providers’ IP ranges, though.

Bro, I owned a /23 at a colo for over 10 years. Registered my ip space with ARIN, had abuse contacts, setup a mail server on a /27 on a /24 that remained mostly unused outside of dev and test servers (strictly controlled). The mail server was also strictly configured to never emit a single email that wasn’t sent by me. So no forwards, no bounces etc.

Mail server still gets blocked by random domains. Nope. Done with hosting email. Everyone assumes you are spam and won’t accept your mail unless you pay them (to be your mail provider).

Some providers are reputation based now. So you need to send emails and slowly ramp up amount over time. Difficult to do if personal though, as you won't get enough throughput.

It's a damn shame. At this point it's basically in then favour of large providers to randomly block domains since otherwise hosting your own would be trivial.

Strange, I don't have that experience

How recent is your experience? Did you set up TLS, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, DANE/MTA-STS? That's what makes modern mail secure and deliverable (besides basics like matching reverse DNS). The beauty of Mox is that it tells you what exact DNS records you need to set up and it takes care of the certificates. Once it's done I found I have better internet.nl score than some big companies.

I self host on hetzner. ticket to support to open 25 and mailbox on a 5euro machine.

If people just want to stick it to the Man by moving out of the cloud, then the solution might be "medium email": hosted by a commercial provider, so you don't have to do all the admin, but not self-hosted.

My ISP, Zen, in the UK, gives static IPs. That, combined with residential fiber and a thin client makes excellent mini server at home.

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