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how do i self host mail without everything thinking its spam and also without spending money
refer to title
my dad got a new website, we want email, already got a VPS, need way to send/receive email without anything thinking its spam. paying not an option. considered making another ms365 e5 dev subscription but this is a serious thing so eh.
also might switch my own asn contact email to my vps if this works out right. any ideas?
Comments
I'd recommend if your current email solution works just stick with that. My risk tolerance is pretty low on email and I'd rather pay someone for something so critical to my primary business. If not, then I'd go with Jarland at MXRoute. If also not, then just run it through the VPS and just make sure it's configured well enough. Over time it'll get better IP reputation but there's only so much you can do and you're kind of shit out of luck if problems come up.
To be fair (and I don't mean this to be a dick), I don't think you're equipped to handle it if shit gets out of hand. Especially for something as important as email.
Time for a mailcow?
Just a fair warning, we did mail hosting for years, I've even thought of getting back into it. It's a headache to maintain, even if it's just for one user, properly.
Keeping off lists, IP rep, DKIM. I would only ever consider it if I owned the subnet it was going to be on, and had the time to properly maintain the rep of the subnet as a whole. I can't tell you how many whole subnets I've seen SBL'd because of a bad rep.
So if you are on a VPS, and don't own the subnet the IP is from, you are eventually going to hit a brick wall where the subnet is listed because of someone else, and you as the hoster can't get it off the list. MS loves to block subnets that are on lists.
Email is cheap, heck you can get email for a $1 a month per address for basic entry-level business email. Or pay $4 a month for MS exchange online, to me its a no brainer, why fuss.
Need a beafy VPS and clean IP's and make sure your reputation is good, but other than that mailcow or Poste.io is the way to go. But its not worth it imo.
mxroute
Try Skiff. They allow custom domains in their free tier. Very Otusy
Been using 365 E5 for years, no issues at all!
If its really serious then just pay for it -_-
Just get this - https://accounts.mxroute.com/index.php?/cart/&step=3 and be done with the headache of email management.
I added one but the verification is very slow, been a couple of hours now.
SPF, DKIM, forward confirmed reverse DNS, not using a spammy network. That'll solve most of it. Usually. Sometimes.
Thousand Yard Stare with that "Sometimes"
You forgot, the moon has to be in alignment with venus, and the tides have to be high. In which case, yes, "should" work, mostly, kind of.
So, if I own clean /24 and mounted on personal ASN - mail is doable? DKIM, DMARC, SPF etc. is not a problem to create and maintain. The problem is big players such as gmail, outlook, yahoo and others eventually will stop / rate limit / outright reject your mails. This is insane.
@jar how many /subnet's do you operate? Clean IPs are important as well as how long they stay such.
if you want something that just works you could try out mailinabox, after installation you can go to the admin panel where there is a tab for instructions where it will print out an entire text file that you can import to lets say clouflare so all of the right records are pointing to your box. There is also mailcow or iRedMail that are also great options.
Don't forget, sometimes the big dogs just get persnickety and don't want to accept emails from your domain or IP or subnet....why you ask? Just because they had a bad day and your email flew across their logs.
I've had domains shadow banned from MS one day, no reason, then a week later just work again. Big dogs don't play by the rules they make everyone else follow
Around this time we got out of email hosting for that reason
if it does not come from either google or microsoft then it is spam LMAO
Pretty much yeah. I mean, the real problem remains hitting all of these from one range without trouble: Gmail, Hotmail, Verizon, AT&T. I always like to note that it's all of them combined that presents the most widespread issue, it's at least 1 of them that becomes problematic from almost any range. But I also like to note that many many people don't even need to hit all of those. Many people barely even send mail and when they do, it's entirely to Gmail (the absolute easiest to solve, they really only kind of use spamhaus and their own stuff).
All of MXroute runs off of 1 /24. A /22 is set aside for the job, but if each IP isn't seen often enough by Microsoft then you actually hurt your reputation by not being seen enough by their systems. Too little is bad, too many is worse.
Cance the VPS and use the savings to buy MXroute.
You are not paying extra.
They might be using the VPS to run a whole slew of other stuff.
Takes 3-4 hours
Pretty much, yeah.
I have a 2 tier mail. One selfhosted for all the internal stuff and one with gmail.
After a while of sending mail to my internal system from gmail, answers start going through and after a few years they can talk without any problems whatsoever.
While I hate the "everyone is guilty until proven innocent" kind of attitude, I think the devs at google know what they are doing and the system can learn.
We also have many redirect rules for various situations towards the internal mail so I suppose that helps as well.
i wonder if having an entire subnet of ipv6 would fix that type of filtering.
Well now that Jar has given up his big mac sauce, we can all venture out and do it ourselves! I'll call you from my Bugatti.
Gmail has a fairly documented but undocumented hatred for v6. They say it's not programmed, that it must be the result of their learning algorithms if anything. But many have noticed it.
WUT?
I think google loves IPv6 in general, but maybe their learning systems have an issue with it. Since I presume the learning has been designed for v4 and v6 was pasted over, the much bigger ranges are somewhat problematic and their system of guilty until proven innocent is, as such, generating more false positives proportionally.
A lot of people have noticed a higher chance of spam folder delivery or rejection over v6. When asked about it Brandon said it wasn't intentional, but not impossible (paraphrasing his mailop response to it).
It's not consistent, you may not notice it. But you'll find people who have somewhat easily like:
https://www.spamresource.com/2020/11/honestly-dont-send-to-gmail-over-ipv6.html?m=1
We should not have to turn to corporations for email. We need to be able to host this ourselves.
With this in mind, I recommend Mailcow.
Agreed! Should be able to host my own email. Alas, big corps control the net. Biggest issue is most large email hosts are at exchange online or google, if you wanna get delivered there you have to host there also.
The key is that there's value in pooled power. We don't just need more self hosts, we also need more medium sized mail providers. So go forth and compete, spread thin enough to not give anyone too much power but not so thin that you can't stand up for yourself.
All I ever wanted was to gain enough power to give us all a seat at the table, and make enough to be comfortable for doing it.
well atleast there nice enough to put our stuff in spam and not reject it entirely :')