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Comment by chj | Hacker News Reader

What do you use for spam filtering?

Another problem is you will have to use a third party smtp server, otherwise your mail will be rejected by a lot of email providers.

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SpamAssassin and friends still do a reasonable job for me, and have for years. I delete a handful every day, but like the parent I've had my email address since 1996, and I haven't been too careful about using it. If I had to do it over again today, I'd look at rspamd. Getting people to accept your mail can be a pain in the ass, yes, but it's not impossible.

* Get a "clean" statically allocated IP address.

* Control your forward and reverse DNS and make them match.

* Set up SPF/DKIM.

* Fill out the Yahoo Bulk Email sender form

That last one probably isn't really necessary, depending on how much email you send to Yahoo.com addresses.

Do you have any tips on testing for deliverability? I have a hunch that if I try to send something, say to my gmail or one of my close friends' email, that the spam filter will allow it because it's a familiar name/domain, but I would expect that if I email a stranger's gmail, it might get flagged...

You can use http://www.mxtoolbox.com/ to see if your domain or IP have been blacklisted by any ofthr public lists. Also, if you get blacklisted you should receive a bounceback email telling you who blacklisted you and where to go to get yourself removed.m

I've been running my own mail server since 2006 and have never had a problem with being rejected. I've run a fairly tight ship:

1. Only allow email locally (i.e., via webmail and ssh) - which many would regard as a real pain, but I and the few people who use my server have been OK with. IMAP is very useful with this policy, for batch move/send from outbox folders.

2. Set up TLS to only deliver via SSL

3. Advertise both these facts via SPF (I haven't bothered with DKIM)

That's bollocks. I have my own email server on some random Hetzner IP address and have never had email rejected; and do note my domain TLD is .ro which tends to get higher spam scores.

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