>I'd love to tell people the only way to replace gmail is to get either your own mail server or at least your own domain,

It's trivially easy to get blacklisted as spam that way...

This is kind of FUD. I’ve been running my own mail server for over a year now, and my E-mails don’t magically disappear into some blacklist. Do you have to be careful when configuring your server? Yes. Can you get on a blacklist erroneously? Yes. Does not going with a hosted solution mean you cannot participate in E-mail? No way.

I don’t know where this myth comes from that running your own mail infra means your mail will be marked as spam. You’re not the first (or second or third) person to mention it though.

It takes a long time to build up IP reputation if you run your own infrastructure. Even today after a year+ on the same IP, DKIM/SPF/DMARC, senderscore of 100 and transactional email only, Yahoo still randomly blacklists us for weeks at a time. Good luck getting in touch with a human to figure out why when you aren't Gmail or another big player in the industry.

Aside from Yahoo though, we generally haven't experienced any blacklisting or deliverability issues. It does require time to setup properly and maintain however, you can't just set it up and forget about it.

That's exactly part of the problem. If email went back to decentralization properly, the whole idea of ip reputation could go away, which is genuinely wrong and against email in the first place.

As someone who's had his entirely legitimate, wholly none-spamming email accounts blacklisted (numerous times) because he used the same shared server as someone less than saintly, I can attest that this is actually a genuine and existant concern.

Sure, it's 'easy' to get around, by throwing more money and complexity at the problem, but it isn't some made up tale.

I would not use a shared server for E-mail hosting, for this exact reason. Even if you are the only person on the IP, you need to watch out your first couple of months because the IP you have could have been misused in the past. If you find your new host’s IP on a blacklist, request a new IP from your provider.

>Can you get on a blacklist erroneously? Yes.

Can any random adversary easily have you blacklisted just for fun?

Can some Wordpress or other such service you run with your own email get you in trouble?

What about any when viruses (and botnets) in any PCs you have in your company go bezerk with your account?

And so on...

Maybe this is too much tinfoil, but it feels like Google has a bit of a perverse incentive here to make their spam blacklist unnecessarily trigger-happy. After all, anyone they block will just think running their own mail server is too hard these days and might switch back to using Gmail...

I think "get your own mail server" doesn't necessarily imply that you're doing all of the setup yourself. Using a provider like fastmail (or Google apps, fwiw) is a good way to be sure that you set it up right.

Granted you can't set up your own Google Mail domain for free today like you once could, but some of us are grandfathered in... I am, and I'm still looking at this as a better alternative to Gmail because even though it is Gmail, I can take my address with me if I do ultimately change my mind about Gmail.

(That's the first step, at least. You can never take @gmail.com with you, but if you want to start moving away, you could forward to your own domain and start thinking about where you would host it.)

Erm, no. Yes, DMARC, SPF, DKIM is needed, with static IP and a properly configured and authenticated mail system, but once that's OK, it's fine.

I've been running my mail server for 10 years now, I got on blacklists 2 times: once due to a worm that got in through PHP, the other was a client's laptop that got a virus and used outlook express to send mail.

>I've been running my mail server for 10 years now, I got on blacklists 2 times

So how's that an argument that "it's fine"? Sounds like 2 times more than a regular person would want to deal with such issues within a decade, much less a small company. And it can take long to clear those things out if you're small fish...