I’ve been happily running my own mailserver for ten years, but recently, the overlords (garbageMail and MicroShit) have been blocking my messages. I think I knew the day would come when they successfully push me out of SMTP, and it’s today. I have 100% compliance: SPF, DKIM, TLS, DANE, DMARC, etc. yet everything I send goes to spam. Emails I reply to (with reply headers) go into spam. How can they even justify it?
I don’t want a full inbox (pop/imap). I’m just looking for a privacy-friendly SMTP service for sending mail with reputation. I’m not mass-marketing so pretty much whoever is cheapest per month and respects my privacy.
Looking at like, mailgun, simplelogin, proton? This is so sad.
Afaik one of the parameters that is used to grade remote servers, is how much legitimate mail it has sent recently. This causes small servers to with few emails sent in total each day/week to score higher on spam evaluation.
I’ve read documentation on newsletter services, that if you elect to use a dedicated IP address for your outbound emails, it needs to be “warmed up” over a few weeks with smaller groups of recipients, and that you need to keep a persistent high volume once it’s warm. This helps keep your SMTP host “well-known”, which is somehow more trustworthy.
Of course newsletters and personal email are not the same, but they unfortunately go through the same spam-filters.
Similar to SEO, there’s a lot that isnt public (some for obvious reqsons), so it’s a lot of guess work / trial and error / anecdotes. This volume thing I’m pretty sure is real. What is almost certainly real as well is open rates. If you send a bunch of mail that isn’t opened, this isn’t good either.
The warming up was in the docs for the 3rd party mail service I managed for work a few years ago when we wanted to switch to a dedicated IP. They also cautioned to keep open rates up. I assume they have the data to advise their customers appropriately.
I’ve mostly run my own mail servers since around 2000, and I gave up a few years ago and started using a 3rd party for outbound SMTP. I had considered giving people free SMTP accounts to boost legit traffic, but I didn’t know how to prevent spam/scammers from using it. Like if I posted on Reddit that I was doing that, I’d probably get legit people, but also almost certainly a spammer or few. As such, idk how anyone can practically run their own SMTP server today unless they sort of bootstrap it with a few legit newsletters (that people actually want and open) spread out over multiple days or transactional emails like say a ticketing system (if the people receiving them are the types to actually open them).
As far as personal emails going through the same spam filters, there are some headers newsletters add that I’d assume handles them slightly differently (list-unsubscribe).
I hosted for years and got tired of fighting with the big players servers… then I realized 95% of every email and sent or received was going to or from a person’s Gmail account and gave up.
I have been using https://www.scaleway.com/fr/transactional-email-tem/ from scaleway. They have a 300 emails/month free allowance which is enough for me. Haven’t had any delivery issue, but haven’t tested extensively either.
it’s known that google doesn’t want you to use email, they want you to use gmail. same as how all those fucks co-opt standard protocols (XMPP, ActivityPub, etc.) and then defederate it and make it their own walled, proprietary thing.
I ran a slew of geo-dispersed mail servers for a decade+; not really spam as it’s willing recipients but essentially not that far from it, either. also fully compliant, experimenting with voodoo-adjacent tips for improving deliverability (none of them work). so glad to be out of that racket.
anyhoo, you can utilise mailchimp/sendinblue/etc as they have a direct pipe into gmail/outlook infra and are not subject to any of those harassment tactics, which is basically payola. the prices last time I was involved with checking things weren’t that much better (worse in fact, if you add the costs of running all that shit) than transferring everything to gmail and friends, which is their ultimate goal.
https://tools.sendmarc.com/ Is a good start. Listen back through the security now eps where he’s setting up his own email list with his own email server.
