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Comment by matheusmoreira | Hacker News Reader

You don't have deliverability issues?

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.

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I've run my own mail servers for many decades and have never had any deliverability issues. I've also never used bargain basement cloud VPS services with horrible reputations.

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.

> The best way to ensure a good reputation is to obtain your own address space from a RIR.

There is the slight problem that RIRs ran out of (v4) addresses almost a decade ago.

Not true, at least for ARIN. If you have an IPv6 allocation, you can obtain one or more IPv4 /24 allocations, so long as their stated purpose is to provide IPv4/IPv6 compatibility (e.g. for dual-stack services or NAT): https://www.arin.net/participate/policy/nrpm/#4-10-dedicated...

> obtain your own address space from a RIR

How does one do that? And what are the costs involved?

From your HN profile, I see you're in Brazil, which is part of the region IANA has delegated to LACNIC. Per [0], LACNIC has further delegated numbering authority in Brazil to Registro.br.

Following the links on that page (or performing a simple Google search) leads one to: https://registro.br/tecnologia/numeracao/como-solicitar/

[0]: https://www.lacnic.net/1016/2/lacnic/ip-request

Looks like I need to become a literal ISP then.

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.

https://registro.br/tecnologia/numeracao/custos/ Setup R$ 14.080,00 (~ 2,624 USD) anual cost R$ 3.379,20 (~ 630 USD)

Wow, that's pretty crazy, compared to the US. I paid a one-time fee of $50, then $262.50/year for IPv4 block + IPv6 block + ASN: https://www.arin.net/resources/fees/fee_schedule/

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.

This seems like a lot of TODOs for something I’d rather just pay a few cents for

> 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.

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.

Like the parent have ran Email servers for many years now. If you get a bad IP, as long as you get the DKIM records right, over time it will 'warm' up the IP. And the more you use the email on that IP and NOT spam people. The IP will warm up. Make sure you actually own that IP!!! It will become valuable.

Key point - own the IP. We own our IPs and we also buy elastic IPs from AWS. The entire AWS subnet (it seems their entire address space) is universally garbage and unwarmable. Our own IPs have hummed along for years with zero issues.

This does you no good for the months or years it takes to "warm up" your email while your messages are getting thrown into the trash.

Deliver via sendgrid*, receive directly is probably the only viable path for self hosted systems.

Where sendgrid=any major player, could be Mimecast, proofpoint or anyone else who will forward outgoing email.

FWIW, a huge percentage of the spam I get is via Sendgrid, and at some point in the past year or two their abuse reporting mechanisms all turned into black holes, so mail sent via Sendgrid is heavily penalized in my spam rules.

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.

I don't have deliverability issues to the big providers, but that comes down to the age of my domain and my IP in a clean non-residential block. But you won't have reputation issues if your friends and family also run their own server and don't enforce such arbitrary requirements. Running your own servers, not only for email, is the only way to regain control over your computing.

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