31–40 of 314 posts
Been running it for over 15 years. No SPF. No dkim. Never had complaints, though threads like these have me worried.
I've been running my own mail server on AWS for about 3 years now. Postfix, Dovecot, and a Rails app I wrote for webmail. At first I had 0 deliverability but over time it's improved to near 100%. Just setting up SPF, DKIM, not being on a blacklist, and building up a reputation of good mail seems to have worked wonders. I've been wanting to move to DigitalOcean but I don't yet know if there will be a significant hit o…
It's gonna be really hard. I work at a hosting company and our staff has to work constantly to make sure people's servers get taken off of spam blacklists, or IP blocks of ours need to get removed, etc. There's a lot of stuff to navigate out there, basically kludges that have been put in place because email is just such a terrible, insecure system. I'm sure if you're willing to put in the effort you can do it. But fr…
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You didn't understand the question. I already have the mail server running. That's not the problem.
This is probably no help to you, but since you're doing this already, you may know. Is it feasible to self host your own email server but then use something like Mailgun for SMTP?
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You didn't understand the question. I already have the mail server running. That's not the problem.
This is probably no help to you, but since you're doing this already, you may know. Is it feasible to self host your own email server but then use something like Mailgun for SMTP?
I run my own mailserver and have done since ~2012. I don't have DKIM or DMARC set up but I am using postfix and not qmail. I'm sorry I can't help you with your delivery problem - except that to say that if you didn't have eg rDNS set up to begin with gmail might have a negative cache of it. I haven't had problems with delivery of outgoing mail except to a couple of poorly administered exchange hosts run by recruitmen…
One idea I just had: inspect the headers of your emails as they are received in a gmail account. These will often contain diagnostic information that will help you debug any problems (with SPF/DKIM/etc)
I'm doing it, also using Qmail. I've felt the same pains as you (even started to suspect that providers might detect mail was being sent by Qmail and scoring that lower (perhaps (only) spammers are using Qmail today?), but more probably my network block (Hetzner.de) is the biggest reason for my difficulties). Here's what I've done on top of your list: - backscatter prevention (using my own https://github.com/pflanze/…
Why would other MTAs have a buff against Qmail? I'm using maradns for DNS but I respect djb's software a lot. I'm using his publicfile as an httpd. I have already added my domains in google's postmaster tools. So far it hasn't helped much
Make sure you don't send spam and your server is properly configured. If you are sending mails to people that don't want it then it is spam. "They silently agreed to get our newsletter because it was listed in our ToS on page 357" is not acceptable. No other excuse for sending spam is acceptable. Whenever you send any automated mail there must be an easy way to unsubscribe.
A few more tips:
* Check your mail server on http://multirbl.valli.org/ - if it's in any blacklist try to find out why (there are a few rogue blacklists, ignore them).
* Hotmail allows you to receive a report for every mail that a hotmail user thinks is spam. Use that. Act on it.
* Check your logs for messages that indicate that others think you're spamming.
* E-Mail forwarding is a tricky business these days. Avoid it.
I occasionally get dubious spam rejections, but they don't come from the large hosts. They usually come from some small ISP using a proprietary antispam solution that gives you no insight what's going on.
My suspicion would be that qmail is your problem. There are a great many details that a mail software has to get right, qmail often doesn't do what the email ecosystem expects.
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Why would other MTAs have a buff against Qmail? I'm using maradns for DNS but I respect djb's software a lot. I'm using his publicfile as an httpd. I have already added my domains in google's postmaster tools. So far it hasn't helped much
I think the parent's hypothesis was that MTAs would negatively weight any MTA that isn't the custom ones running on Gmail/Outlook/Yahoo servers.
Receiving email is easy. Sending it is much harder. One of the things that is the most frustrating is that if you end up on a blacklist, or a large provider decides independently not to trust you, it's often completely silent when it blackholes all your outbound emails to that service. I've just moved over to a hybrid of hosting my own MX servers for incoming email, and forwarding all my outgoing emails to an email-a…