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Show HN: A self-hosted email engine

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Re: Show HN: A self-hosted email engine

#32
post #2

Awesome. We can never have enough of high quality self hosted software.

As someone who has been out of the PHP game for a long time, is it still a viable choice for new software? I don't have fond memories of the language at that time, so seeing PHP in the demo video poster frame was an immediate mark against pitching this at my company. That made me wonder whether it's a reasonable reaction to have. Edit for the downvoters— this is an honest question and I very much agree that we can ne…

I understand not wanting to write PHP for an app I have to maintain as part of my daily work, but for something like this where you want to sell it to anyone and have it run anywhere, it's hard to be more universal than "PHP and MySQL" (though it does make me smile when SQLite is an option as well).

Re: Show HN: A self-hosted email engine

#33
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has been out of the PHP game for a long time, is it still a viable choice for new software? I don't have fond memories of the language at that time, so seeing PHP in the demo video poster frame was an immediate mark against pitching this at my company. That made me wonder whether it's a reasonable reaction to have. Edit for the downvoters— this is an honest question and I very much agree that we can ne…

PHP is a very good choice. If you want to refresh your knowledge of PHP take a look here: https://phptherightway.com/ It's fast. PHP has great documentation. PHP ecosystem is now based around Composer, in comparison to mess of package management in JavaScript and Python, Composer is just wonderful to use. Packagist has ton of libraries. Share nothing architecture is very easy to maintain and scale. You can do strict…

The hazard is that it was such a big mess in the past that if you want to hire someone to work on your self-hosted app, there are going to be a lot of applicants who want to use PHP the wrong way.

Re: Show HN: A self-hosted email engine

#35
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, Google will flag as spam most new email servers by default. Email deliverability is a cartel these days.

yeah, came here to ask -- how do you not end up in the gmail spam folder?

I'm surprised that someone is having problem sending email to gmail from their own smtp server. I am doing this for years with tens of thousands emails delivered every week (sometimes daily), yet had no issues. Here are few advises:

- ensure your external IP reputation is good. Check blacklists.

- configure correct dns/reverse dns (PTR) records.

- setup SPF (maybe DKIM with DMARC but I'm not using these)

- do not spam.

Thats it.

Re: Show HN: A self-hosted email engine

#36
post #4

This is not my area but why dont people setup their own smtp servers, and use plain tools like readcube?

Hosting your own email service is way more difficult than just spinning up a smtp server and some interface. Most big providers (like gmail) are more likely to flag incoming mails from unknown servers. That's the reason why stuff like Sendy[1] is so popular. You host your own interface, settings and so on, but the ugly part of sending your email is handled by AWS SES. [1] https://sendy.co/

probably depends on the amount of mails you send. i have done this with thousands of emails from a dedicated server and they didn't end up in spam

Re: Show HN: A self-hosted email engine

#37
Please endure my ignorance, but what is this? Spamtool with a potential feedback trough images in html mail that report back if email was viewed? I just don't get it, this can be acomplished very simply with shell script and web server... or?

Re: Show HN: A self-hosted email engine

#38
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, came here to ask -- how do you not end up in the gmail spam folder?

I'm surprised that someone is having problem sending email to gmail from their own smtp server. I am doing this for years with tens of thousands emails delivered every week (sometimes daily), yet had no issues. Here are few advises: - ensure your external IP reputation is good. Check blacklists. - configure correct dns/reverse dns (PTR) records. - setup SPF (maybe DKIM with DMARC but I'm not using these) - do not spa…

If only it were that easy! This usually isn’t enough anymore.

First off, you don’t really have control over your external IP reputation, unless you have your own IP space, which most people don’t.

You’re at the mercy of your colo/hosting, really. You get whatever IP they give you, baggage included. I think the reputation is also subnet-based, not IP based, so your potential to be included in someone else’s blast radius is increased.

Also, even with a clean IP, the steps you outlined are not sufficient to send significant numbers of non-spam messages and not get spamboxed. Gmail seems to be mostly okay with erring on the side of false positives.

Source: been running my own email servers for 25 years

Re: Show HN: A self-hosted email engine

#39
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's only true if you're spamming people a lot. Running your own postfix server is trivial, and you'll have a fine reputation so long as you aren't sending marketing BS.

Unfortunately, this is the total opposite of my experience. I've never sent any spam from my domains and yet Gmail refused constantly to let any of my emails through regardless of my VPS provider, my DKIM/SPF setup and so on. The _only_ way I could solve it is by letting my email be managed by some other email service provider (I went with Zoho but I don't think it matters).

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: A self-hosted email engine

#40
post #38
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised that someone is having problem sending email to gmail from their own smtp server. I am doing this for years with tens of thousands emails delivered every week (sometimes daily), yet had no issues. Here are few advises: - ensure your external IP reputation is good. Check blacklists. - configure correct dns/reverse dns (PTR) records. - setup SPF (maybe DKIM with DMARC but I'm not using these) - do not spa…

If only it were that easy! This usually isn’t enough anymore. First off, you don’t really have control over your external IP reputation, unless you have your own IP space, which most people don’t. You’re at the mercy of your colo/hosting, really. You get whatever IP they give you, baggage included. I think the reputation is also subnet-based, not IP based, so your potential to be included in someone else’s blast radi…

then how do the email services , who post massive amounts of emails and many of them are spam manage to get through? do they have some kind of deliverability deals with gmail?

(btw my mails also seem to get through and i haven't even set up DKIM)

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