Getting a clean IP and keeping it clean is a hassle. Some networks (eg. AT&T) use some sketchy blacklists that blacklists entire B-blocks and you have to get them to whitelist your IP. The problem is that after you finally get your IP in a nice state, then you are stuck with that IP. And with many of the cheaper VPS providers, that means you are stuck with that instance because the IPs are paired with the instances.

But some VPS providers allow you to have a reserved IP that you can use as your SMTP IP, keeping it independent of your server instance. I'm about to switch to vultr.com for this feature, which means cleaning another IP but hopefully the last one for a long time.

FYI: I have had very good experience using Centurylink (previously Qwest) for serving email from home. It is only $6/month extra to get a static IP with reverse DNS. In the 10+ years I have used them, the addresses blocks they allocate static IPs from have never shown up on a blacklist.

I know that for many people here DSL does not provide sufficient bandwidth to suffice as the primary home internet connection, and $60/month is pricey if you only plan on using the connection for email, especially compared to a VPS. It is much less expensive than paying for a business account with any of the other ISPs, though.

I guess I was lucky because I haven't encountered a "dirty" IP yet, but I only tested 6 VPS providers so far.

PTR records are updated from the VPS provider web interface, it takes a few seconds to activate.

The last time i rented a new server I checked the IP in the various blacklists. There was one blacklist that had listed the entire subnet the server was in. I asked them to whitelist my IP address in that subnet which they did. It took only a few minutes to write an email.

I had this sort of thing happen yesterday. Two IP addresses in my email server's /24 were flagged for spam so the whole range was blacklisted. I wasn't able to send email for about 8 hours until it was cleared for me. But this was 8 hours of outgoing email downtime in two years of running my own server.

It took quite a lot of knowledge what blacklists are out there and time to check them all. It's hardly "just a few minutes to write an e-mail".

https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx takes a few seconds? Then to follow up is a few more minutes

There have been sites that check an IP against the vast majority of blacklists for well over a decade, and they've been free as well.

https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=how%20to%20check...

I run RBL checks a few times a day in Nagios, so I don't get surprised.

I used http://multirbl.valli.org/ but who knows how many are out there, not including private lists.

It's the private lists that will get you. What do you do if Google has your IP address on an internal blacklist? Or your health insurance company? Or some random Barracuda-style e-mail filtering appliance? Nothing. You're screwed.

In that case, the IP is screwed. I plan change IP, or hop hosts if/when this happens. I opened 6 accounts on 6 different hosts, and only two are active for this reasons. So far so good :)