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How to run your own mail server (2017)

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Re: How to run your own mail server (2017)

#101

Post by djsumdog »

deorder wrote: post #44
dpcan wrote: post #22

Then you realize the true pain of having a near-zero reputation when trying to email anything to people on Gmail, Yahoo, Live, etc, etc. Expect to go to spam even if you have DKIM, SPF, and no relaying. If anyone actually knows the secret to not having your own mail-server's mail go to spam on these bigger systems, please tell, I've Googled it for years with no success.

GMail even considers some emails from Google to be spam. I missed some important (billing and security notification) emails from Google this way.

Yea I was running into problems with my gmail address to other gmail addresses, even before I split off and started running my own server. Their spam filter has a super high false-positive rate.

Re: How to run your own mail server (2017)

#102

Post by hcarvalhoalves »

dpcan wrote: post #22

Then you realize the true pain of having a near-zero reputation when trying to email anything to people on Gmail, Yahoo, Live, etc, etc. Expect to go to spam even if you have DKIM, SPF, and no relaying. If anyone actually knows the secret to not having your own mail-server's mail go to spam on these bigger systems, please tell, I've Googled it for years with no success.

Yes, there're a lot of tricks.

I used to run a mail server in the past, and initially had problems with reverse DNS resolution not setup correctly, it's an easy oversight depending on where you host.

https://mxtoolbox.com/problem/smtp/smtp-reverse-dns-resoluti...

Re: How to run your own mail server (2017)

#103

Post by djsumdog »

singron wrote: post #29
dpcan wrote: post #22

Then you realize the true pain of having a near-zero reputation when trying to email anything to people on Gmail, Yahoo, Live, etc, etc. Expect to go to spam even if you have DKIM, SPF, and no relaying. If anyone actually knows the secret to not having your own mail-server's mail go to spam on these bigger systems, please tell, I've Googled it for years with no success.

I had DKIM, SPF, rDNS, etc. at first and went to Gmail spam. I registered on gmail postmaster tools and got some friends and family to add me to their contact lists and send me some outbound mail. Google now sends me more mail than I send them, and now I don't go to the spam list, even for gmail accounts I haven't contacted before. This was for personal email. If you are trying to send commercial email this strategy…

I don't have a high enough volume for my personal e-mail to even show up on the postmaster tools.

Re: How to run your own mail server (2017)

#104

Post by yellowapple »

dpcan wrote: post #22

Then you realize the true pain of having a near-zero reputation when trying to email anything to people on Gmail, Yahoo, Live, etc, etc. Expect to go to spam even if you have DKIM, SPF, and no relaying. If anyone actually knows the secret to not having your own mail-server's mail go to spam on these bigger systems, please tell, I've Googled it for years with no success.

Gmail seems to have no trouble with my mailserver. AT&T/Yahoo used to, but there was some online form I filled out at one point to get myself whitelisted (it was years ago; don't remember the details) and that stopped being an issue. The main problem right now is Craigslist (which outright refuses to deliver my server's mail, so I have to use my Gmail account or stick to SMS / phone calls).

Stack: OpenBSD VM (on 1984.is) running OpenSMTPd + Dovecot + a DKIM proxy + ClamAV + spamd.

The more relevant pain point is that the VM hangs every couple months and I have to hard-reboot it from the VPS web console. Also, I've been pretty lazy about staying on top of new OpenBSD releases. One of these days I'd like to go redundant (whether with both mailhosts on 1984 or putting one on a different provider), which would make it less stressful to do OS upgrades (I could keep one host running while doing an offline upgrade of the other, as opposed to hoping the online upgrade process doesn't break anything).

Re: How to run your own mail server (2017)

#105

Post by dewey »

big_chungus wrote: post #53
mgalgs wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious why you're so attached to the qmail style subaddressing. Personal preference or is there a technical advantage?

Possibly not getting blocked. Many sign-up fields will block foo+spam@bar.net if I try to use it.

I've ran into this issue maybe twice in years and I'm always using that for websites. I'm having a feeling that issue is a bit overblown.

Re: How to run your own mail server (2017)

#106

Post by twobat »

jjirsa wrote: post #99
twobat wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most ISP don't care about it. But there are certain enterprises that know almost nothing about email, they employ "specialized tools" that scan and classify incoming email (read Symantec whatever) and make evereyone's lives harder.

It's not that they dont know or don't care - it's that not being super aggressive with filtering caused people to almost abandon email a decade ago because spam became unbearable for most people. Those "specialized tools" make email viable. Without it, everyone would be spoofing everything and you wouldn't use email anymore.

At my last place of work one could send as ceo@company. Still, they had crazy (proprietary) filtering. People make things better by accident, in the mean time they tick check boxes.

Re: How to run your own mail server (2017)

#107

Post by ram_rar »

Hosting email is definitely a pain. You could do all the validations with DKIM , SPF , ARC etc. Its not helpful if the reputation score of the server is low.

I have been thinking about this for a while , there should be a way to decouple email server and storage into 2 different services, where I could authorize email server to grab the data from storage. The storage service itself should have zero knowledge encryption. This way, I could just switch between email services.

Re: How to run your own mail server (2017)

#108

Post by hckr1292 »

singron wrote: post #29
dpcan wrote: post #22

Then you realize the true pain of having a near-zero reputation when trying to email anything to people on Gmail, Yahoo, Live, etc, etc. Expect to go to spam even if you have DKIM, SPF, and no relaying. If anyone actually knows the secret to not having your own mail-server's mail go to spam on these bigger systems, please tell, I've Googled it for years with no success.

I had DKIM, SPF, rDNS, etc. at first and went to Gmail spam. I registered on gmail postmaster tools and got some friends and family to add me to their contact lists and send me some outbound mail. Google now sends me more mail than I send them, and now I don't go to the spam list, even for gmail accounts I haven't contacted before. This was for personal email. If you are trying to send commercial email this strategy…

I've had a similar experience. Switching IP address of my mail server lost me some reputation, but mostly just using the directions mailinabox.email has worked for me

Re: How to run your own mail server (2017)

#109

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

the_angry_angel wrote: post #83
curiousfab wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason I never had problems, even after a recent change of my IP address because I moved to a new VPS. Hetzner VPS, proper reverse DNS, SPF, that's all, not even DKIM. The only big ISP that doesn't like my mails is AT&T and I couldn't care less (in Europe, rarely have to deal with people @att.net).

In that case you are very fortunate. I was running my own mail server for nearly 10 years on Hetzner. Prior to that on other hosts and in the distant past at home. Running mail servers is something I have done professionally and successfully. The last time I moved boxes as I had many times before. I was on clean IP range but I had no IP reputation at all. In the past this wasn’t such a problem, especially with SPF, D…

I wonder if there's some sort of relay setup that could be used to mitigate this: e.g. if you want to run your own mail server, sign up for some kind of "mail ring" that transparently proxies the (encrypted) traffic from all the member mailserver administrators. That way, your public IP has a higher volume and more leverage getting delivered.

Re: How to run your own mail server (2017)

#110

Post by cyphar »

starbugs wrote: post #32
Naac wrote: post #15

A ( somewhat ) happy medium between hosting your own email ( and dealing with getting IP blocked ) and fully entrusting youtself to Google is to use webmail as provided by your domain name registrar. For example, gandi.net provides web mail on your own domain. Even, better, it has support for wildcard email just like google does.

gandi.net doesn't support external domains. I'd be thankful for any recommendations that aren't totally overpriced and allow for external domains.

Mailbox.org is fairly cheap (a few euros a month) and it supports custom domains. It also has some neat features like auto-encrypting all incoming emails to a given PGP key (while not perfect it makes all of your emails more private in storage and makes it harder for a compromise to result in past private information from being stolen -- though of course Mailbox.org could in theory just keep the original messages around). They're also based in Germany.
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