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A comment on What Mailchimp does to make sure emails get delivered. Parent comment

Re:What Mailchimp does to make sure emails get delivered by inopinatus on Saturday July 16, 2016 @08:16PM (#12108398)
I'll beg to differ. I've been running my own email for almost two decades and although the environment has changed, it is still perfectly accommodating of small operators that keep themselves up-to-date with context (e.g dnswl listing, notifications to major recipients, signed headers, best practise DNS records etc etc).

I changed IP address in the last 18 months and despite great trepidation, was pleasantly surprised that deliverability was not degraded.

Paying a bond feels like protection money for something I think my domains/hosts already have: a good reputation.

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Re:What Mailchimp does to make sure emails get delivered by interfixus on Sunday July 17, 2016 @03:22AM (#12109358)
So have I, and I have experienced mounting difficulties over the last couple of years, despite decent efforts to keep up with protocol and defense mechanisms. Delivery to gmail and hotmail/outlook accounts is becoming a game of chance.

I shall probably, with huge regret, hand over the delivery process to an external operator in the near future.

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Re:What Mailchimp does to make sure emails get delivered by drdaeman on Sunday July 17, 2016 @04:16AM (#12109448)
> Delivery to gmail and hotmail/outlook accounts is becoming a game of chance.

I haven't had any issues recently, but wonder... Are the failures still well-noticeable? I mean, when Gmail/Hotmail reject the letter - do they do it properly (SMTP 4xx/5xx rejection) or maybe they're now silently discarding it?

When I had the issues (even with large mail providers), my MTA had always generated me a bounce, and it had always contained something sensible and immediately useful - like a message that my DNS records got messed up or IP got in a blacklist. Every error message I saw contained links or clues to how the delivery problem could be resolved. Had this changed?

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Re:What Mailchimp does to make sure emails get delivered by NathanOsullivan on Sunday July 17, 2016 @04:40AM (#12109487)
Yes, hotmail will in some instances accept mail at SMTP level and then silently discard it. You cannot even request de-listing.
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Re:What Mailchimp does to make sure emails get delivered by xyzzy123 on Sunday July 17, 2016 @06:59AM (#12109727)
I had to deal with delivery issues to hotmail (few years ago though) and despite a few hoops, found them pretty reasonable to deal with. Some tools here: https://mail.live.com/mail/services.aspx and https://mail.live.com/mail/troubleshooting.aspx
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Re:What Mailchimp does to make sure emails get delivered by interfixus on Sunday July 17, 2016 @10:19AM (#12110231)
No, that's the horror. Often they just drop the thing without as much an error code.
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Re:What Mailchimp does to make sure emails get delivered by drdaeman on Sunday July 17, 2016 @10:52AM (#12110350)
Dropping the connection with mere TCP RST (or whatever it is) is fine by me. Accepting the message, saying 200 and then not delivering it (not even to the "spam" folder) — that's what I feared.
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Re:What Mailchimp does to make sure emails get delivered by jamiepenney on Monday July 18, 2016 @12:04AM (#12113173)
We used to have issues sending password reset emails to users with Outlook hosted email - Outlook would return a 250 status code, then silently discard the email. It never turned up, not even in the spam filter.
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Re:What Mailchimp does to make sure emails get delivered by mike-cardwell on Sunday July 17, 2016 @06:56AM (#12109721)
Ditto. Except for about 15 years. It's not difficult to run your own mail server and deliverability is fine if you keep on top of changes in the tech.
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Re:What Mailchimp does to make sure emails get delivered by chrissnell on Sunday July 17, 2016 @05:01PM (#12111796)
Interesting. If you would write a blog post or a Show HN on this, I'd love to hear more. I ran my own servers for years but the spam arms race (as a recipient, not a sender) persuaded me to switch to using one of the big providers. I miss the flexibility and privacy of running my own email and if there's a way to do this without a bonded sender program, I'd love to see how it's done.
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