51–60 of 209 posts
One day I ran in some problem with backscatter causing my mail server to be listed. It's good to setup your server to be less prone to this, I wrote a blog post with some configs / tips:
https://willem.com/blog/2019-09-10_fighting-backscatter-spam...
In my new company we are using Gmail though. Easier to manage for non-tech people and it’s fully managed.
The main headache? Anti-spam. A lot of IP ranges are just outright broadly blacklisted (e.g. residential IPs, some hosting services), but also a lot of individual IPs reused by hosting providers got blacklisted for actually sending spam. Then you have trust scores which are a huge chicken/egg headache (how do you gain trust while being span-binned from the get-go?). You'll spend your days asking to get unblocked from various random third party providers that you may never have heard of (e.g. email a small business about their online shop, and their email vendor bounced you because they never heard of you, they take ten days to respond, and now it takes two weeks to email some random small business).
Plus the ever-changing requirements (and they ARE requirements, if you lack reverse DNS/DMARC/SPF/DKIM/TLSA/valid certificates you will be blocked).
It is just a headache, time, and it actually costs more for the pleasure. Free Google Workspaces killed 90% of people self-hosting, too bad it costs tons of money these days.
I host at a couple of levels: * Mail in a Box for a bunch of low-volume domains, hosted on a major cloud provider VM. Total SMTP volume ~2k outbound emails a month. This was previously hosted on my own server in a datacenter. * Plesk/Postfix for a higher volume domain tied to a nonprofit, SMTP relayed out through Amazon AWS. Total SMTP volume ~100k emails a month. Likely moving this to a standalone Mail in a Box inst…
> Microsoft's similar service Would someone remember the name? I've tried to search for microsoft's postmaster but did not find anything.
Xeams is monolithic (has all SMTP/pop3/imapd/... integrated), using it for 1 domain and a bunch of email accounts.
I access it from K-9 on Android or from a Web-Gui (Roundcube).
Someone change my mind but I find hosting your email to be risky. I could lose my domain through social engineering or just by being in a coma and there is 0 grace period so if someone registers I lose everything.
Most registrars can auto-renew so as long as your card stays valid you’re fine.
I use Gmail. I used to self-host when my time was worth $15.50/hour (college), but these days I have many things more important in my life than meddling with email servers and fretting about deliverability.