Re:Small mail server best current practices
by throwaway2048 on Monday July 27, 2020 @08:28AM
(#23964428)
Unless you have substantial volume to gmail (hundreds of mails a day), I can virtually guarantee gmail is spam boxing your mails, try mailing an account you have never sent mail before for instance.
They don't refuse delivery, but that is entirely meaningless when nobody ever checks the Spam box anyways (which is also hidden by default)
Our email volume is pretty low - average is probably 5-10 a day.
Hmm, I just tried what you suggested, with 2 different accounts never sent to, and the emails got through fine.
We use SPF and DKIM, but otherwise it's a fairly standard Postfix/Dovecot install (albeit a very old one).
Re:Small mail server best current practices
by snowwrestler on Tuesday July 28, 2020 @01:59AM
(#23972734)
Would you mind sharing where you host your email server?
I have a pet theory that big email platforms care deeply about the IP "neighborhood" the sending email server lives in. So a small email server set up perfectly in Digital Ocean IP space would struggle, while an email server set up OK in (for example) CenturyLink Enterprise IP space would get through.
In that time I've had a single incident (earlier this year) where spammers got it and sent 20k spam mails in less that 24h mails. Luckily I noticed this and stopped it pretty quickly.
I had mails to some destinations bounce for around a week after that.
Beyond that incident, it's very rare to have trouble delivering mail - I think maybe once in the past 5 years there was a company who I had trouble with.
Having said all that, the spam incident this year highlighted how fragile hosting your own mail server can be if things go wrong, and I felt really bad about the spam mails sent from my server - continuing to run it almost feels like a liability, and when time permits I plan to move our mailboxes to O365