I've heard this before, but I have my own vanity domain, a well run mail server (postfix), and I I've never had a problem. I do support DKIM, SPF, DNSSEC, and of course I don't send spam. I have heard that newly registered domains do have a period before they are trusted.
I can confirm that. It took me a while to get a sane mailserver setup, but eventually I don't have any troubles with Gmail/MS/Yahoo anymore.
I used to run my own mail server for ~7 years and never had issues. I used DKIM, SPF, etc and still do although they're problematic with mailing lists...
Setting up your own email server will bring you into the wonderful world of big email corporations not delivering your emails until you subscribe to their whitelist with, for some of them, subscription fee. Back in the time, I had this problem with sending emails from my private server to yahoo or microsoft (hotmail, live.com, etc...), both refusing to deliver my emails to their clients as I could be a potential evil…
I agree with you but wanted to give a data point that I have been self hosting with cloudron on digital ocean since almost 2 years now and I have had no problem with mail delivery.
I can highly recommend Mail-in-a-Box [1], especially if you're looking for a solution that is secure, easy to install, and doesn't require any fiddling. You can host it on a cheap VPS for $5 a month and it'll happily chug along without any problems. Deliverability will only be an issue if you land up on an IP address that was previously abused, so it may be worth checking out the IP address reputation on DNSBL [2] be…
I find this funny because your own email is on Google apps.
Hi, we had similar concerns about privacy and have built https://cloudron.io to solve not only the hassle of setting up email but also other services where applicable selfhostable options are available. The mail server is fully built into the platform itself and automatically takes care of all the tiny details required to get over the often stated deliverability issues (SPF, dkim, PTR, ...). So far we have found that…
After years of self-hosting I finally switched to https://protonmail.com and I'm much happier for it. Self-hosting is still possible nowadays but email delivery is an uphill battle. You can expect to write several major email providers to remove you from their blacklists even if your address and domain reputation is good. VPS privacy and security is questionable and dedicated servers are usually expensive. Hosting SM…
I can second this. I used to selfhost mail and it was a lot of work to keep up. Nowadays I am also quite happy with protonmail but since I got cloudron installed for other services, I just enabled mail there and will see how that goes over the next few months, so far so good. Hopefully I can go back to email selfhosting through that in the long run.
Also I agree, the privacy implications when using a VPS is still something worth taken into account.
I'm really happy with https://www.migadu.com . i just converted to paid. It's nice to be able to add users and domains without a price change.
One of the small businesses I work with has used them for ~6 months. Way too many rejected emails and mail server failures for my comfort (about 1%). I'm probably going to switch soon if the problems aren't resolved. Too bad, the product and price is perfect for our needs otherwise.
I use GoogleMail behind a custom domain ($50/year) and am quite pleased. I used to be a FastMail customer but a couple minor outages and weirdness around billing made me switch a few years ago. Functional "report spam" is a big win for GoogleMail, and as an apps (or is it "GSuite" now?) customer you don't have to worry about ads/privacy issues. Don't self-host, I self-hosted (Postfix/Dovecot) before using FastMail and it was a huge headache between reasonable spam filtering on the receiving end, and undelivered/spam-marked emails on the send side, although I learned a lot by self-hosting. Also, it was hard to pretend I was serious about privacy/security when I was self-hosting on a box that any Linode admin could shell into as root, especially after Linode's security dramas. This is not to say that self-hosting cannot be cheaper and more secure than alternatives, but if you're not a full-time sysadmin regularly setting up mail hosts, you probably will get something(s) wrong. I never could silence that voice in the back of my head saying "what if some really important email couldn't be delivered to/from me?", which was sometimes right. As others have said, you have to use GPG if you're serious about privacy, regardless of your email provider. Anyway, for me, $50/year is a great deal for reliable email with good spam filtering, and being able to use my personal address/domain for Google Hangouts and Docs is a decent win for collaboration.
Simply not true. Telekom gives your data on a plate to whichever agency wants to access it. To the point that an NSA watch post is 5 minutes away from the Telekom headquarters in Darmstadt.
Not anymore. Yes, they used to, but since some incidents with NSA spying Merkel&Co, they closed all such collaboration programs. Now they are building something like a closed garden, where only german interests have access. If this is tamper and intrusion proof, this is other story.
The Merkel case was denounced by an infosec outsider during a local security event. The local government/news played down the shock and made sure that no real (legal) consequences would happen. Would therefore say that collaboration still happening, perhaps not so voluntarily with the new gov but doesn't really differ much.
More worrying is the dark fiber backbone between Frankfurt and Darmstadt and the satellite uplink from both space agencies placed on the same city. Plus the fact they keep hiring more contractors to work on that specific location. If critical networks are monitored, civilian networks stand less of a chance.
Setting up your own email server will bring you into the wonderful world of big email corporations not delivering your emails until you subscribe to their whitelist with, for some of them, subscription fee. Back in the time, I had this problem with sending emails from my private server to yahoo or microsoft (hotmail, live.com, etc...), both refusing to deliver my emails to their clients as I could be a potential evil…
I've been running my own mail servers for quite a while and I can assure that this is total nonsense. No large email host charges a fee for mail delivery. There are some rogue antispam solutions that do so, but they are rare and only used by shady small email providers. There's even an RFC stating that charging for blacklist removal is forbidden. You will sometimes have delivery problems, although the problem is much…