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> Gmail's search and spam-filtering are both very good

Google/Microsoft's spam filtering makes it impossible to send e-mail from a self-hosted solution.

http://penguindreams.org/blog/how-google-and-microsoft-made-...

Unless you're sending out thousands of e-mails per day and build your reputation with their magic-goo trust filter algorithm, you cannot run your own e-mail server and run with the big players. They have made self-hosted e-mail totally unreliable.

I think what you meant by "very good" is "piss fucking terrible."



Not for my use-case. There's basically nobody self-hosting email that I want to receive emails from. It turns out the egalitarian "Everyone is an Internet admin" solution favored the spammers heavily over the technocrats or common users; letting Google build a system that defaults to trust-off for self-hosting proved to be valuable for a lot of people.

(Because if a tech-savvy user really wants to email me, they know how to make a throwaway email account and sign the correspondence with a verifiable PGP key).


I haven't had any particular issues getting past spam filters, it certainly takes some time to build IP reputation but in general with nothing more than SPF and RDNS properly configured my mails get through. I really should get DKIM/DMARC working eventually, but my current email solution (GroupWise) doesn't support it natively so I'll have to do some nonsense for that..


I had this problem self hosting but was able to remediate it by making sure my server was doing all the smart modern things like dmarc etc... there are some good resources on HN from others who've set up all the right things.

Of course, this all happened after I got bitten during a job search and had most of my applications hit spam folders ಠ_ಠ


If you read the post I linked, I have the correct DMARC, SPF and DKIM records and signatures happening. If I send them to my old University (google) account, I see all that get verified and correct. It doesn't really help.

I suspect part of it might be that it's on a Linode and might be sharing a subnet with other spammy machines. That's probably why MailChimp owns a class C and refuses to sell any of it.


Interesting. I am on Linode as well, that sucks.

Do you host an https site on the same domain? Is your mail server responding to ipv6? (I hear this can be a problem)


Can you recommend a good resource for "how to set up your mail server like it's 2017" for those of us who would like to self-host but don't want to spend 6 months figuring it all out?


From recent memory this post covers all the stuff I did with my server: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11946756

There are a lot of testing tools you can run mail through as well to see how well you score.


You may find this interesting:

https://mailinabox.email/




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