DKIM, DMARC, SPF, rDNS/PTR, EHLO… all correct and verified in the email “original source,” BY GOOGLE. Still goes to SPAM folder because **** you, apparently. I hate Google.
DKIM, DMARC, SPF, rDNS/PTR, EHLO… all correct and verified in the email “original source,” BY GOOGLE. Still goes to SPAM folder because **** you, apparently. I hate Google.
Tbh, out of all services I’ve seen people self-host, email is the most common one I’ve seen people describe as a bad idea™️.
I just chose a paid mail service (mailbox) and called it a day.
I’ve been hosting my e-mail for over 2 decades now, e-mail goes everywhere but gmail (despite working with them for years). They are doing it exactly so people stop doing it.
Yeah we should just let them win. Why fight? It’s not like most of the spam and phishing come from Gmail and hotmail accounts. It’s those fucking self hosters
Honestly self hosted email can be just for self hosters talking to one another and that’s fine
Maybe the way to fight GMail’s outsized power is to stop using GMail. You can do that without going all the way to self-hosting.
Yeah, I figure I did enough of a step by moving to Tutanota. Selfhosting email seems like overkill unless you’re running some large organization or doing self-hosting as a hobby.
How’s your self hosted email going? Any advice you can share to avoid some of the issues described?
I’ve run a mail server since the late 90s. I gave up running my own outbound years ago. Whether it gets received is too inconsistent. Primarily, make sure the IP you use isn’t on any spam lists. If it is, get a new IP or try to submit appeals. Make sure you have the standard anti spam/authenticity measures implemented (they’re listed in the OP).
These are the minimum. Years ago it was enough to have reasonable delivery. Unfortunately these aren’t that helpful anymore because spammers also set them up (often with seemingly randomly generated domain names). I assume because not having them was a fairly strong signal for being a spammer, so now they also set them up, which also means there’s not really any configuration / setup you can do to seem legitimate (aside from mail volume and the content itself which will be analyzed).
Anyway running your own SMTP itself is easy. The problem is getting your mail to the inbox or at least spam/junk folder (your mail may get blackholed and not even show up in spam). At least when you get a rejection, you know something is wrong, but many times the receiving server will indicate a success code and simply not deliver it to the user (not even to their spam).
Interesting! You said you gave up on the outbound, does that mean you can’t reply to mails you receive? But if you can reply, does that mean the sender (let’s assume someone with gmail) will get it or would even that likely end up blackholed or in spam?
I can reply yo emails. It’s what jaybone said – I use a 3rd party outbound (SMTP).
I use Thunderbird as my mail client. In there you can define multiple IMAP/pop accounts (inbound) and multiple SMTP (outbound). So when I click reply, the SMTP I have set for that email address is a 3rd party service that sends emails using my domain.
This does have a privacy implication, so whether that’s appropriate for you is for you to decide. The 3rd party can read and save a copy of your outbound email inclusive of any content included with it (like the email you’re replying to if you include it).
Ah nice, that is a great idea. I will try this out, thanks!
What 3rd party service do you use?
Don’t take this as an endorsement as it’s not really intended to be used for this purpose and I’m probably going to switch, but I’ve been using sendgrid for a few years as I was familiar with it from business use. I was using mandrill before that until they changed their pricing and some other things.
EDIT: also worth mentioning I have a grandfathered free plan.
Good for you if you have a grandfathered account, but Sendgrid has a terrible interface. Setting up things is so messed up!
Again, not an endorsement, but Qboxmail is nice and EU-based.
Maybe they send emails using someone else’s smtp server? (Like some paid service that provides smtp?)
@toxicmode @galoisghost I think those of us who can should selfhost an email address at least to contact other selfhosters even if we can’t use it effectively to contact users of Big Email. That’s how the network effect begins
Think of it like how a lot of the Fedi defederated from Gab or/and Thereads, except that this time it’s Big email that’s forcing the defederation
https://badrihippo.thekambattu.rocks/clog/staying-away-from-big-email/
Stop tempting me! I might do it.
One question, I currently use proton mail to use my domain for email and there are no issues afaik. Do you think a few years of using proton will have “whitelisted” my domain enough or will all the issues pop up once I change to hosting it myself?
Same. It’s great for a technical challenge. Don’t do it for your primary email unless you’re ok losing emails and having them rejected a lot.
Soon not using a chromium browser will probably be considered a bad idea
I get what you mean, but this website specifically works completely fine on my Firefox (with uBlock). Please check your browser settings for things like disabled JavaScript.
Yeah everything is disabled its Firefox focus, everything always worked fine then like this past week all sorts of sites started showing that
Even using a reputable hosting provider and personal domain will get you spam black holed these days
I wonder if there should be some kind of law or regulation around this. It’s an antitrust issue. Though no one in Congress would understand what this is.
There most certainly should. But Americans live in a corporatocracy.
Does gmail not do this kind of blocking outside of the US?
This here. My emails end up in gmail spam folders occasionally from what I am told. And I don’t self-host. I just use a good webhoster and my own domain. Fuck google.
Many hosting providers won’t even let you try, they don’t want to host potential spammers.
I use a free outbound smtp relay that lets me do like 5k emails on the free tier. I use it primarily for alerts and Immich updates / new user links. But I don’t do inbound so don’t have to expose any ports. Only time I did was to do validation with the relay so just a few minutes during setup.