You also need a server with a good IP address reputation located in a non-sketchy country and a domain that isn't brand-new. And probably more.

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eikenberry 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You can also host your own MX servers but use a provider for SMTP. Almost any mail provider that supports custom domains will work at their lowest price point.

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cnst 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm pretty sure the reputation thing is overstated, else, how would all those providers be able to scale up their SMTP services themselves?

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msm_ 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

From experience, it's not overstated. Running your own email server is pain, and even if you do everything right you may get delivery problems. And if you want to improve your chances, you have to do whatever big tech wants you to. And if you ever get onto the bad side (for example, your site is hacked and distributes malware for a few days) you may never recover.

It's not impossible, but it's not something you run once and forget.

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SoftTalker 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Gmail or Apple scaling up is going to be treated differently from some random new domain suddenly appearing on a Digital Ocean or Hetzner or AWS cloud instance.

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cnst 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

But how would anyone know it's Gmail or Apple if the IP address is new?

That's exactly my point, that the reputation need is overstated by all those services that claim to solve a known problem that everyone has heard of, but noone has actually experienced, because, guess what, it might not actually exist.

I've seen plenty of cases where the emails sent out through Sendgrid et al, end up in the Spam folder, or these "professional" services don't even attempt to retry, thus, never getting through the greylisting, or other bugs which cause deliverability issues, which would never happen if you were to run your own real mail-server on your own hardware yourself.

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SoftTalker 14 hours ago | parent [-]

Sendgrid, Mailchimp, et. al. ends up in the spam folder because most of what they send is spam.

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cnst 13 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm not disputing that assertion, yet it does go against the marketing materials we're all presented by all of these services, as for reasons to not run our own mailservers.

In other words, if all you want to do is run a personal mailserver, or even a corporate one, you'll probably not have to deal with this supposed IP reputation issue, unless the IP addresses you use, have already been added to the blacklists even before you start at it.

	▲	Bender 11 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Running your own mail servers to do the volume emitted by Sendgrid would indeed be on the level of starting your own medium sized business. Getting IP allocation, swip'ing them out to divisions of your company or your customers and paying into whitelists for all the "free" email providers like Google et al would be a massive up front cost. Running your own mail server for personal email is an afternoon of setup DKIM, DMARC, SPF, FCrDNS and such, setup of your MTA/IMAP/WEB preferences, tuning some filters, setting up aliases, accounts for family and with time the tuning work eventually slows down and then it's just maintaining accounts, aliases and the occasional rules to block problem networks and domains. With time you may find some servers that require lowering security or filters but that is also very easy.
	▲	SoftTalker 13 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Yes if you are using a domain that's been around for a while and has a reasonably stable IP address history and is not on any blacklists, that is the defintion of a "good" reputation. Or at least it's not a bad one.

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layer8 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There are a lot of small email hosting providers that don’t seem to have much trouble.

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micromacrofoot 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

it's very easy to get blackholed by major providers like gmail though, and very difficult to get out