Selfhosted
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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I mean… you can, but beyond the technical aspect of setting up the hardware/services/DNS, you also have to deal with the unknowable black boxes that are the major email services. As a very small server, you’re gonna run into deliverability issues and have absolutely no feedback or recourse from the giants. There’s a decent chance that you’ll end up with a perfectly configured mail server that, through no fault of your own, fails to actually get your messages to their recipients.
(Sorry to be a bummer here! If you do go this route, I hope that everything works out well for you.)
As someone who runs a self-hosted mail service (for a few select clients) in AWS, this comment ring true in every way.
One thing that saved us beyond SPF and DKIM was DMARC DNS records and tooling for diagnosing deliverability issues. The tooling isn’t cheap however.
But even then, Microsoft will often blacklist huge ranges of Amazon EIPs and if you’re caught within the scope of that range it’s a slow process to fix.
Also, IP warming is a thing. You need to start slow and at the same time have relatively consistent traffic levels.
Is it worth it, not really no - and I don’t think I’d ever do it again.
I think this is largely why people complain that email hosting is so difficult. It's not the hosting, it's that so many people are doing it with a cloud hosting providers IP space. AWS, Azure, and Digital Ocean all tend to have their IPs in at the very least grey lists. Many home ISPs DHCP scopes too.
Getting a proper static IP, your own subnet from ARIN, or finding a colo with their own IP space will give people much better results.
What would it take for a residence to get an ARIN subnet?
I had this issue. And all I wanted was an SMTP server to send emails to myself.
Apparently it doesn't matter what you tell spamhaus, gmail will still treat you as radioactive if your IP address is listed as "residential".
That should not happen if I'm using AWS SES SMTP endpoint to send emails right? So receiving in my VM but using Amazon to deliver emails.