Self-hosted email no longer works
 

Interesting read from someone who thinks it is no longer possible to self-host email: https://cfenollosa.com/blog/after-se...y-has-won.html

Though in my experience trying a fair number of small email providers I have never run into serious deliverability issues. I will say that sometimes I have encountered mysterious non-delivery of certain individual emails, but not a complete block of a service. I do think certain TLDs are blocked more than others, which is why I never use anything other than a .org, .net or .com.

the self hosted IP is easy blocked by different providers. for 199903.xyz the IP is currently blocked by Apple Mail and AT&T Mail. but the cloud host provider is kind enough to help me fix up it.

Finding and holding on to an IP that delivers to all three of these and their sub brands is the real challenge: Microsoft, AT&T, Verizon.

Most people don't even need to send email to all three of those so they won't even notice which one is blocking them. But it can be challenging as AT&T and Verizon, for example, will often ignore requests to remove blocks or respond stupidly with things like "You are on a dynamic IP" (even when clearly not). Then of course consider that nested under those two are Yahoo, AOL, etc.

I've had to call in favors, use well hidden back channels, etc. Nothing wrong with self hosting and I often encourage others to do it, but safe to say I don't feel threatened by it just from knowing how much work I've had to put into deliverability. There won't likely be a shortage of people who are just tired of doing it.

It is absolutely true that the blogger there is a bit dramatic but I do get it, I'm no stranger to pulling out my own hair over how these giant companies try to hold down the little guy. I have trouble faulting him for that. The list of providers silently blackholing email though is really just Microsoft, I don't really encounter that anywhere else. Surely I could say I have a large enough sample size to feel comfortable saying that.

Is there any way to detect if your email is being blackholed other than knowing someone who you trust and can report back to you? The problem I find is that when people swear they are not getting your emails it often turns out that they went to spam or junk for some reason and once they add you to contacts or whitelist you the emails go through.

I just saw that Rob N of Fastmail commented on the article:

https://lobste.rs/s/icdrmv/after_sel...wenty#c_erae4n

No good way to know, but if you have a lot of customers there's always a few that speak up. In my case 100% of "we sent it, they never received it" refers to Office 365/Hotmail/Outlook. I'm excluding from that people who report the behavior but made a clear error on their end (like not actually sending the email).

The next closest comes down to offices running filtering appliances that quarantine emails and their IT team has to get involved. Often those send back a message to the sender.

Managing some smallish email lists with Constant Contact and the sort I have noticed that it is fairly common for someone to mark legitimate emails they signed up for as Spam if for some reason they decide they no longer want to receive the email or they don't like some particular story in the email. They should be using the unsubscribe function, but they don't. I suspect most people have no idea what these options even mean. I often wonder how quickly a few people marking your legit email as Spam will ruin the reputation of a small email provider and start getting you blocked. By the way, the same people that mark an email as Spam often call up after awhile to complain they are no longer receiving your emails. For my own personal email use I have found that if something is really important and I want to make sure it goes through I use Gmail and it almost always gets right to the Inbox. Many times I have found that Gmail will get through when other emails will not.

Yeah I see a lot of that too. This right here is the absolute key to keeping it managed as an email provider: https://fbl.validity.com

The insights gained from that are legendary, far above the insights that a person usually gets to see.

It seems to me that, unless you are trying to do bulk mail on the cheap, the advantage of having your own mail server is having full control over incoming mail. The only advantage of doing your own outgoing mail is avoiding the cost of outsourcing it.

I suspect that most who brew up their own email servers think they are creating high privacy and security when in reality all it takes is a fire, flood, or other routine disaster to wipe out everything. My office building was hit by lightning, which created a huge pile of destroyed computers. No ordinary surge protectors do squat for a direct hit.

You may be right about what motivates "most" self-hosters, although I don't really know. When I self-hosted it was mostly to have more control. If a message didn't arrive that I was expecting, I could always look at the logs -- and it was losing the ability to examine log files that caused me the greatest reluctance in moving to a third-party provider. As for security, I don't think I was ever under any illusions that I could get anywhere near the security that, say, Fastmail or Google can offer their customers. As for privacy, I don't think of email as a private form of communications, and I'm suspicious of any provider that makes privacy their only or primary selling point.

The disaster scenario brings up an interesting point. I don't know about "most" but I believe many self-hosters lease or co-locate a server in a real data center. In fact, my currently idling mail server is in an OVH data center. Of course, if you aren't doing frequent, regular off-site backups, the disaster scenario is still very real:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-f...-idUSKBN2B20NU

I agree, but then you become dependent on someone else's servers, security, etc., so it seems to defeat the purpose of running your own email servers. I used to work for a fairly large email service provider and I remember one night when a server died and the backup couldn't be brought online by the tech folks because it was the middle of the night and they needed a longer cable. There were none at the data center so someone had to drive 60 miles round trip to another location to get a cable long enough to patch in a new server. Not everything is instant digital magic even today!

IMO that's a good argument against your presumption that the chief motivations are privacy and security.

I think there are several more common reasons why individuals run their own servers, including:

• They are enthusiasts who want to have a go.
• They want their email to be set-up the way they want it, without compromise. They may also think they can do some things better than email hosting companies.
• They have a webserver and configured email as an afterthought.

My "presumption" is just a guess. I suppose we could ask all six of the people doing this why they are doing it!