Fwiw, not a knock against CF. I like their products, mostly simple, fair pricing, etc. Just a bit unfortunate commentary on the state of email infra on the internet.
The days of people running their own servers are gone because of the shortsightedness and laziness of IT managers. They though the "cloud" would be easier and cheaper, and they are now trapped.
I entertained the idea of running my own mail servers for a while. After researching the topic it turned out that the internet now runs on an IP reputation system. Major email services like gmail assume that anything sent from unknown IPs is malicious.
So it looks like we've gotta be well connected to federate with the other email servers now. A nobody like me can't just start up his own mail server at home and expect to deliver email to his family members who use gmail or outlook. So I became a Proton Mail customer instead.
Where sendgrid=any major player, could be Mimecast, proofpoint or anyone else who will forward outgoing email.
Sending reputation is just as applicable if you're using a third party as if you're hosting it yourself, but much less under your control.
The best way to ensure a good reputation is to obtain your own address space from a RIR. Barring that, you need to choose a provider with a decent reputation to delegate the space to you.
There is the slight problem that RIRs ran out of (v4) addresses almost a decade ago.
How does one do that? And what are the costs involved?
Following the links on that page (or performing a simple Google search) leads one to: https://registro.br/tecnologia/numeracao/como-solicitar/
Before I even start this bureaucratic process, I need to create an actual organization. Then I need to be assigned an ASN. Only then I'll be allowed to beg them for IPs. Once all that's taken care of, I need to tell them things like what the IPs will be used for and what my infrastructure is. If they like my answer, then they'll approve my request and finally tell me what the prices are.
I've been through the process about 10 times now at various companies, and the paperwork (at least for ARIN) is no more difficult than what would be expected to justify IP space from your typical ISP. If anything, the ARIN folks are more responsive and technically competent than your average ISP support agent, which makes the process easier.
You have to buy/rent a dedicated IP address (that you'll be able to keep long term), and it warm it up by gradually increasing mail volume over a few months to weeks. But once you have, deliverability shoudl be fine.
I think the bigger issue is needing to keep on top of mainenance of the server.
I have arrived at the opinion that what I would do if I moved to selfhost would just be to pay some trivial amount for outbound email via a provider like sendgrid as someone else in these comments has also mentioned. Since I send out maybe a half dozen emails a month I don't think this would be a big deal.
But when I relied on selfhosted email several years ago, I was always inundated with spam, which SpamAssassin was wildly undermatched to handle -- that was one of the main reasons I moved to gmail. So I'm curious what people who are happy self-hosting today are using.
I also run SpamAssassin on my server, but I don't believe it ever had to do anything.
Are they? I'd bet 90% of the email in your archive went through Google or Microsoft or Yahoo's servers, and most likely a copy still resides there.
If you're sending to or getting a message from a Gmail account, Google still has a copy.
Well, one time I was unable to send mail to a guy with an ancient @att.com email address from his ISP. I got a nice bounce message back with instructions to contact their sysadmins to get unblocked.
To my surprise, they unblocked the IP of my mail server in a matter of hours.
Where people will absolutely have problems is trying to run a marketing campaign through their own IP. You absolutely will (and should) get blocked. This is why these mixer companies exist and why you pay for an intermediary to delivery your mail.
when was the last time you got a reply to an email you sent?
But most people who can run a server should be able to setup OpenSMTPd with the DKIM filter and Dovecot. It's much easier than configuring postfix like we had to do in the past.
To answer a sibling comment, the last time I received an answer is a few minutes ago. The correspondent's email infra is hosted by Google.
I used to run all the components and maintain it (even that wasn't bad), but I changed to mailu[1] about a year ago
[1] https://mailu.io
I don't know why. At the same time they don't want to get rid of the bbdd servers, or the app servers.
Maintaining a email service must not be as easy for them.
The problem is that Gmail will bounce any emails from DigitalOcean IP, even if you sit on this IP for years (so no recent spam), even if replying to someone, even if you registered as 'Postmaster' on Google.
So if you want to selfhost, you'll first need to find an IP that's not blocked to begin with.
So it's hard (to do well)
>The problem is that Gmail will bounce any emails from DigitalOcean IP, even if you sit on this IP for years (so no recent spam), even if replying to someone, even if you registered as 'Postmaster' on Google.
>So if you want to selfhost, you'll first need to find an IP that's not blocked to begin with.
I'd say this is just the thing antitrust was made for. Hopefully some incumbent can get them to court.
This is very much a myth. There's a lot of FUD around how mail is "hard", but it's much less complicated than, say, running and maintaining a k8s cluster (professionally, I'm responsible for both at my org, so I can make this comparison with some authority).
Honestly `apt install postfix dovecot` gets you 90% of the way there. Getting spambinned isn't a problem in my experience, as long as you're doing SPF and DKIM and not using an often-abused IP range (yes, this means you can't use AWS). The MTA/MDA software is rock-solid and will happily run for years on end without human intervention. There really isn't anything to maintain on a regular basis apart from patches/updates every few months.
> > The days of people running and maintaining their own are pretty much long gone
Is less about the pieces you've mentioned, and more about reliable delivery without fighting blacklists, ip/domain reputation blackholes, etc.
But in practice, you can find any number of VPS providers, running in local datacenters, with modern self-service interfaces, with at least some IPs that aren't already spam flagged (and you can usually file a ticket to get a new IP if you need it), that are often cheaper per month than AWS, and give full root and everything. Find a service that will help you warm the IPs before you send to customers, and you're good to go!
The main difference is that you're fully in control of the k8s cluster, but no matter what you do, you don't have control over the email infrastructure, because deliverability depends on the receiver. On every receiver you send to.
People say "I don't have deliverability problems!" but how do you know? Most places don't tell you they rejected your email.
> People say "I don't have deliverability problems!" but how do you know?
Because people reply to my emails.. because I email documents to family/friends/landlord/etc and they receive it as expected..
> Most places don't tell you they rejected your email.
Of course they do, this is what DMARC is for.
Except that a managed service doesn't solve that for you. They are no better at that than you are. Email services are better at deliverability than you are, because they spend lots of time building their IP reputations and more importantly negotiating with mail providers to guarantee their emails show up.
> Because people reply to my emails.. because I email documents to family/friends/landlord/etc and they receive it as expected..
I'm guessing you don't confirm every email you send with every person though.
> Of course they do, this is what DMARC is for.
I was involved in the creation of DMARC (and SPF and DKIM) so I know how it's supposed to work, but in the real world, most providers do not honor the "reject" flag and actually send the bounces. Last time I dealt with it was a few years ago, maybe it's better now.
For context, I started my career at Sendmail, and I worked on the SPF and DKIM specs, so I've dealt with deliverability for 25+ years. I also ran my own mail server until around 2009. But I switched to Gmail as my primary around 2008, when deliverability just got too hard. But I still worked on commercial deliverability for years after that.
Granted, SPF and DKIM wasn't widely adopted at that point (and DMARK didn't exist), so maybe it's easier now. But at the same time, most of AWS/Azure/GCP are marked as bad automatically, as well as most home internet blocks.
So if you want to run your own mail server, you can't do it on your home router anymore, you have to rent a server in a rack and get a clean IP that's just for you. That costs $$$.
Examples being Git/Github, Crypto/Centralized Exchanges, and as per the topic, email.
But I think that it's an important distinction that the base infrastructure is open, and that technically an incumbent could join the fray, albeit with a lot of catching up to do, and mix it up.
I do, too. What I don't like is that they became too large and now are effectively in position to gatekeep the whole internet.
We are currently running beta tests (really appreciate it if you can join).
Its really not. Everyone can do that (doesn't mean everyone should). I'm running it for millions of emails daily and don't see why I would crappy proprietary service instead.