I wouldnt say that. however setting uo your own mail server is a lot of work, as you have to abide a lot of "security" rules (SPF, DKIM, DMARC, rDNS). Additionally some hosters reuire you to apply for port 25 to be unblocked (e.g. hetzner)
this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
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The set up isn't actually hard at all, if you understand the concepts. Keeping off blacklists is the hard part, as big providers often block entire IP ranges due to one bad actor.
Edit: I meant sometimes your server gets blacklisted for something some neighboring server did
Well I did set one up today and the mails land in the spam folder for GMX, GMail and Microsoft (@live.de), although I set up SPF, rDNS, and DKIM. I have to take a look at how to setup DMARC, beacause my domain hoster doesn't allow free configuration of the TXT entries, you have to use templates and there isn't one for DMARC
Couple things that I've found out,
- Gmail seems to need your server to have IPv6 with PTR, even if the mail is sent over IPv4
- Even a DMARC record with no ruf or rua helps lower the spam score
- For Outlook you need to send some mail to yourself or someone else and mark the messages as not spam manually for a while
- MS365 will even put mails from Gmail to spam initially
- Some TLDs like .xyz will go to spam even if everything is set up perfectly
- Outlook also seems to cache DNS quite long, you may need to wait a day for changes to propagate
- A recently registered domain will land in spam more easily, if it has been registered for a while it also seems to help
If you're not already familiar with these, https://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx (write smtp:your.mx.record is a good tool, and I've also used https://www.mail-tester.com/. Mxtoolbox blacklist check is also good.
I hate it that spammers have made hosting email such a hassle. Hope you get stuff running!
I don't have an IPv6 PTR and I send mails through a .xyz domain and everything still works at least when sending to a gmail inbox.
I managed to set up an SMTP server on my instance, I think I used postfix and dovecot after following some random tutorial. Then followed it with some generic make your mail not fall into spam tutorial to have the DKIM records and whatnot and to my surprise the e-mails reached even my Gmail inbox, which has probably the most strict rules. I must say that setting up postfix with dovecot is the hardest part, at least for me, after that it was just copy-pasting commands and setting some DNS records.
On your own email server make sure that you have correctly setup dkim, spf, reverse dns, and the ip of server is not on any known denylist - but it still doesn't guarante that your email server would not get flagged as a spam source.
Or maybe setup transport rules that would try to deliver most emails directly, but to major providers like Gmail/outlook which are quite picky via smtp relay - at work we are using AWS SES to do that, it is not that expensive, but it depends on the volume.
I’m piggybacking off of a mail server for a domain I run. My instance is small though so I’m not worried about a flood of emails.
If you are hosting public instances where you're sending emails out, you'll probably want to pay for transactional email providers like sendgrid as you've flagged. Sending large amount of email out yourself while ensuring high deliverability rating is doable, but will often result in more headache than cost savings.
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