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Ask HN: Is it possible to run your own mail server for personal use?
11–20 of 314 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to run your own mail server for personal use?
#12It'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 from my point of view, I'd probably just get a managed VPS with a hosting company who will take care of all the headaches of dealing with spam filters for me. They can be had pretty cheaply and the money is well worth it if you get good support.
Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to run your own mail server for personal use?
#13I am running my own mailserver for several years now and it is quite possible. The problem is, that your IP is new to the other MTAs and you need a couple of months to build up the reputation. Services like the one from Microsoft have forms, where you can delist yourself from their blacklists. Even though you are not blacklisted, it helps for the reputation if you fill out the forms with the MTAs you have problems wi…
Yes, I think this is a great part of the problem. My IP doesn't have any reputation. But how do I build one? I send a very small volume of emails, I'm just one person.
Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to run your own mail server for personal use?
#14I am running my own mailserver for several years now and it is quite possible. The problem is, that your IP is new to the other MTAs and you need a couple of months to build up the reputation. Services like the one from Microsoft have forms, where you can delist yourself from their blacklists. Even though you are not blacklisted, it helps for the reputation if you fill out the forms with the MTAs you have problems wi…
If you go on the blacklist by default then it isn't really a "blacklist", is it? It's a whitelist, and you aren't on it.
Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to run your own mail server for personal use?
#15I'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/better-qmail-remote)
- do the Google domain verification dance (postmaster tools, configuring their entry in the DNS); still didn't prevent mails ending up in spam, but who knows whether it might still have helped.
- started running mailing lists on it anyway, in spite of me knowing that mails end up in people's spam folders, and simply tell all new subscribers that mails first end up in their spam folders and that once they mark them as non-spam the problem goes away. This seems to be working (people haven't complained), and will over time hopefully give my server the reputation I need.
(PS. I'm also still using DJBDNS, with a config generator written in Scheme, look out for tinydns-scm on my Github)
Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to run your own mail server for personal use?
#16Been running it for over 15 years. No SPF. No dkim. Never had complaints, though threads like these have me worried.
Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to run your own mail server for personal use?
#17I am running my own mailserver for several years now and it is quite possible. The problem is, that your IP is new to the other MTAs and you need a couple of months to build up the reputation. Services like the one from Microsoft have forms, where you can delist yourself from their blacklists. Even though you are not blacklisted, it helps for the reputation if you fill out the forms with the MTAs you have problems wi…
If you go on the blacklist by default then it isn't really a "blacklist", is it? It's a whitelist, and you aren't on it.
Yes. I'm not on the blacklists but I'm also not on the whitelists. That's the problem. It's ridiculous!
Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to run your own mail server for personal use?
#18I am running my own mailserver for several years now and it is quite possible. The problem is, that your IP is new to the other MTAs and you need a couple of months to build up the reputation. Services like the one from Microsoft have forms, where you can delist yourself from their blacklists. Even though you are not blacklisted, it helps for the reputation if you fill out the forms with the MTAs you have problems wi…
Yes, I think this is a great part of the problem. My IP doesn't have any reputation. But how do I build one? I send a very small volume of emails, I'm just one person.
Send legitimate e-mails to people you know on those services. Ask them to mark those e-mails as trusted / not spam. Make sure they reply to at least a few.
I've been running my own e-mail server for years. I have DKIM, SPF, PTR, and everything else set up and my e-mail domains and IP addresses are many years old. Every so often, Gmail still decides to spam-bin me for a week or so.
Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to run your own mail server for personal use?
#19You also need a DMARC record (https://dmarc.org) along with your DKIM and SPF records.
Be careful testing your configuration when sending emails to the large providers, you can inadvertently score negative marks against your own reputation, which is hard to recover from.
Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to run your own mail server for personal use?
#20No, not really. It's a constant battle to get delisted from spam blacklists and your site keeps popping back up. Even most companies don't bother with it anymore.