What email server do you run?

What email server do you run?

1. dvk

   5 hours ago

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   +1. I’ve been running Mailinabox.email on a cheap local VPS for 5 years now for my personal email. It’s been absolutely fine, 0 issues with spam or deliverability, despite everyone saying it’s not nowadays. Not sure if I just got lucky with a clean IP or others are exaggerating / repeating others.

2. Unfortunately, the “works for me”-bros don’t change anything about the reality that it’s very difficult to have reliable email delivery these days. It happens to work for you because you were lucky with IP ranges, reputation, blacklists, etc. You won the lottery - good for you. But it’s no longer like this for everyone. And emails getting lost just isn’t something everyone can afford - we are talking about answers to recruiters, clients, family and loved ones, etc. You don’t want these messages to go missing - especially in a way you cannot detect. A single lost message can alter the course of your life.

3. I do the basics (TLS, SPF, DKIM) but it was fine even before I was doing all that.

   Mine wasn’t. TLS + SPF wasn’t enough, I routinely ended up in people’s spam folder, sometimes when replying to them. To be fair I only noticed this on GMail, but their market share is difficult to ignore. And from time to time Hotmail blacklisted my entire IP block.

   My outgoing mail is immaculate though. Low volume personal stuff, no newsletters or anything else that recipients would consider unsolicited.

   So was mine, and I got my IPv4 15 years ago.

   ---

   Now if you can convince all your contacts to get off the giant oligopoly that spies on them, yeah, you’ll probably be fine.

   1. I’ve been self hosting since before gmail launched and not had problems with them. I occasionally had to use my personal account to email gmail users in my last job because gmail decided mail sent from my official @microsoft.com (which, obviously, runs on M365) was spam, but never had to do the converse.

      I think gmail is just nondeterministic and will sometimes decide things are spam. I suspect it does this deliberately to see if people move things out of the spam folder to give a strong not-spam score. It didn’t seem worse self hosting than using a big provider, but if you self host you feel like you should be able to do so,etching about it.

      1. To be honest my biggest obstacle to running my own mail server is the sheer hassle of configuring it. The first time I did so took me almost a week. The second time took me a good day. The third time I just moved over to my provider’s turnkey email solution. I had TLS (self signed, I started before Let’s Encrypt) and SPF, but no DKIM, no DMARC, and no reverse DNS, and I really didn’t look forward to implementing them all.

         I have a simple use case:

         • All email sent to my domain name should go to my inbox…
         • …except perhaps spam, but I’m okay running the spam filter later on my mail user agent.
         • I can retrieve my emails with IMAP (or maybe that newer fancier alternative).
         • No open relay. Only the mail I send is routed, I authenticate myself with whatever standard credential.

         Now I want a setup that does this with one install command and about this much configuration:

         domain_name = loup-vaillant.fr
         user = loup
         password = P4ssw0rd$
         SPF = <stuff>
         DKIM = <stuff>
         DMARC = <stuff>
         TLS_certificate = /etc/my_certificate
         

         I can survive if it takes 3 times as much work, but beyond that I’ll consider writing myself an alternative. Though I’ll probably start with the web server, configuring nginx is just as painful as configuring Apache, and I have yet to convince it to turn on content negotiation (for multilingual support).

      2. I have a similar theory that they sometimes send people down alternative routes on google maps, just to see what the traffic is like and how long the route actually takes.

4. In my experience, you can do everything right: low volume and follow all the latest SMTP communication standards and your email will still be marked as spam. The only thing that consistently worked for me was changing which outgoing IP I used. In that case I have to conclude it’s a matter of winning the IP lottery in the end.

   Since you have had consistent long term success, can you share what hosting platform or AS you are using for your outgoing SMTP server? That would help me reach your level of deliverability success.