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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)

#211

Post by number6 »

jjirsa wrote: post #149
madez wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When someone in a company agrees on a meeting in their office with someone from outside the company, and the visitor arrives at time well-dressed and is rejected by the companies security without any explanation, then who is at fault? It is not the visitor, it is the awful cooperation between the person in the company and their companies security. It is entirely reasonable to show how you've handed your mail to gmail…

GMail being at fault isn't going to make up for a missed invitation (or RSVP) to a special event, or not getting a note of congratulations on an accomplishment, or not getting a message of condolences. Assigning blame is done after the fact to make up for a mistake. Just avoid the mistake.

You can run into this on any service. Colleagues on Office365 got mail filtered by spam. There are false positives on every service.

If I get an explanation from the server I will fix it. I get dmarc reports and I make sure all pass. That's all I can do.

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

#213

Post by peterwwillis »

donmcronald wrote: post #61
ransom1538 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. After many years, I think the algorithm is this: If the FROMs top level domain is in the top 500 websites OR is a .edu NOT SPAM, ELSE, send to "proprietary spam filter". The "proprietary spam filter" is some random crap code that is unique to each email server company. You could spend years trying to figure out how to game "proprietary spam filter" - but it is a fools errand.

I don't think so. I see @facebookmail.com in SPAM folders way more often than you'd expect on both Office 365 and GSuite. I also see mail from Microsoft and Google filtered into SPAM on their own platforms once in a while.

facebookmail.com is not in the alexa top 500, whereas facebook.com is.

spam filters really are this dumb at big companies. usually the way we'd get around it is we'd call up $big_company and say, "hey, could you please remove our e-mails from your spam list? we would like to send your users a lot of mail right now." a few hours later, we'd be good to go.

this was ~2007. it may be harder to get them on the phone now, and the value of your company may need to be higher (we only had a few hundred million, which seems like chump change these days).

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

#214

Post by amaterasu »

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.

Not just the big players, I had a conversation with the administrator of the Australian ISP Bigpond about why my server was being spammed. Their response was verbatim "We blocked Digital Ocean, because we get spam from there" Even with good reputation servers, admins are happy to reject legitimate mail for any reason.

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

#215

Post by baroffoos »

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 must have gotten lucky because mine just works. My exact setup is mailinabox installed on a vps at vultr. Have been sending to gmail addresses mostly fine. Had 1 email go to spam in 2018 but everything else has gone through correctly.

Since mailinabox configures everything for you maybe the issue is that when you set it up yourself you don't quite get it exactly right to what gmail and microsoft demand.

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

#216

Post by trekrich »

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.

the reputation is almost like a protection scheme when it comes to emails. Its prob to make it hard for people to run their own email server. Its better for the security services if most people are doing email from a few providers.

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

#217

Post by jakeogh »

I exited gmail a few days before the "hey lets read your mail and generate ads" took effect. It would great if someone someone else decided to use it and fix it up for their use case:

https://github.com/jakeogh/gpgmda https://github.com/jakeogh/gpgmda-client

Alot and xapian are awesome.

Anyone from github: please check #439658 and let me gen the cookie via ssh. I didnt enable 2FA.

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

#218

Post by baroffoos »

mlrotter wrote: post #27

I feel like if people are gonna take back email this process needs to be easier; like a single application with a web front-end. Hosting email is a pain! This is why everyone seems to outsource their email hosting. Read the comments in the 2017 discussion. Favorite quote: "I run my own mail infrastructure. To say the least I wouldn't recommend it even to my worst enemies. It's horrible." https://news.ycombinator.com/…

I have been running a mailinabox email server for over a year now. You basically just run the install script, tell it your domain name and set the server as the name server for your domain name and its all done. The thing does everything for you including renewing certificates. It then sends you a monthly status email and an email whenever something needs your attention like the certbot renewal failing.

So far in the past year the only manual intervention after setting it up was updating it from ubuntu 14 to 18

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

#220

Post by eikenberry »

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.

Run your own MX servers but use an external service for your SMTP server. A good service will help you with your SPF, DKIM and DMARC setup as part of the service. As you are only using the SMTP service you can optimize for that and ignore mailbox sizes, etc. when shopping around. You should be able to get multiple App Passwords so no shared credentials.
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