The game is certainly not lost. There are many of us running their own mail servers. Gmail will accept mail from your domain if you don't send spam.

You should try it.

Maybe your domain isn’t on blocklists, but what about your IP?

Assuming you don’t send spam, the question of whether or not your IP is on blocklists is primarily a function of both how long you’ve had your IP address, and how well-behaved its neighboring IPs are.

For example I just tried checking[^1] the public IPv4 address of a VPS I’ve been managing for about a year. It’s never sent or received any email for at least as long as I’ve been using it, but it’s showing up on two blocklists![^2]

Surprisingly, my home IP address (which is a dynamic IP, in a pool of other residential IPs) is only on two blocklists[^3] as well. I would have expected more, because in my experience IPs known to be residential are almost always blocklisted, just as a matter of fact!

Of course this doesn’t check the main blocklists used by Microsoft and Gmail. I’d expect my home IP to be on those (because I’d expect the entire pool to be), but maybe my VPS might not be!

Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that whether or not the battle has been “lost,” it’s definitely stacked against anyone who doesn’t start out with essentially a known-good, static IP address that you can control the reverse DNS record for.

You could do absolutely everything else right, but if you can’t get ahold of an IP address from a reputable provider that isn’t known for spammers using their service, you’ll probably have a lot of trouble with delivery of outbound mail. And that’s not a battle that I want to fight right now…

[^1]: https://whatismyipaddress.com/blacklist-check

[^2]: spam.dnsbl.sorbs.net and dnsbl-3.uceprotect.net.

[^3]: dnsbl.sorbs.net and dul.dnsbl.sorbs.net

Yeah... this tends to be the issue. Also, I wouldn't even bother trying to get removed from the UCEProtect blacklists, it's literally just extortion. (luckily I use a small hosting provider so they're not even on the UCEProtect lists)

You're naively ignoring the simplest solution: smarthost through a provider with a good reputation.

You still get to control your incoming email, your filtering, you get logs of everything, you control your email at rest, and you'll still get good logs for outgoing, but deliverability simply is no longer an issue.

So, what other objections do you have for email self-hosters?

Gmail generally works fine. Outlook works too most of the time.

"Outlook Enterprise" is a mess that refuses email for no good reason. Sometimes it's because Microsoft's DNS resolvers are broken (and can't validate SPF/DKIM), sometimes it's because the mail server rewrites message headers and then tries to validate the signature (which fails, obviously).

Set up an embassy. Register your domain for Outlook, but don't really update the DNS (just add Outlook to SPF and DKIM to pass the validation, but don't change the MX). Then tell your MTA to send through Outlook servers when the destination is there (detecting this is a bit tricky), otherwise route normally.

I haven't really implemented this in production, but it worked for me one time as a proof-of-concept when I had an issue with disappearing mail - my message went through that time. Later it worked without any tricks, so I haven't bothered.

This sounds amazing. Know of any walkthroughs online?

Sorry, nope. It was my own idea (to best of my memory, I haven't seen this anywhere else, so I think it was an original one), I've tried it out, it worked, but I never finalized it, nor wrote anything about it.

It wasn't anything complicated, though. I've just did the documented steps to set up Outlook with my own domain (not sure if that's a free option, I have MS365 subscription for Office apps), except that I made no changes that would disrupt my existing mail system - I've added to SPF and DKIM instead of setting/replacing them, and I haven't touched any MX records at all. Then I've just grabbed Outlook's SMTP details and sent a test email to my other test Outlook account via SMTP and it got delivered with my email address, which gave me a confirmation that my idea had actually worked. I haven't really updated my MTA to do the routing thing, as I was about to replace it anyway (I did since then, replaced Postfix with Maddy).

I have. that is why i say the game is lost.

Then either you didn’t configure your server correctly or you were trying to run a server on an IP address that’s part of a blacklisted netblock (e.g. residential).

I’ve had a mail server in colo for over a decade, and I even recently had to change IP addresses on that server, and I’ve had zero deliverability issues. Set up SPF, DKIM, and reverse DNS, and obviously don’t do anything stupid like send spam or leave an open relay, and you should be fine.

> Then either you didn’t configure your server correctly or you were trying to run a server on an IP address that’s part of a blacklisted netblock (e.g. residential).

This is frequently the case but not always. Sometimes you don't have any server issues, and originating IP is totally fine, but your messages are 250-accepted then somehow just disappear into the void without reaching the recipient mailbox (not even the "spam" folder).

Fortunately, it's rare (in my experience), but super annoying when this happens, because with FAANGs there's absolutely no way to reach out for any technical support (unless you know someone who works there and they can help you).

This is what killed me.

I been running my own mailserver for ~two decades. Never had much deliverability problems and none at all with google. Outlook sometimes is a problem but I always got it fixed.

Nowadays I user docker-mailserver which is a bit more low level than mail in a box but much easier to setup than everything from scratch

Is that two decades on the same IP space?

> Nowadays I user docker-mailserver which is a bit more low level than mail in a box but much easier to setup than everything from scratch

Can second that this is some wonderful software, easy to get started with, nicely documented and works without any significant issues: https://docker-mailserver.github.io/docker-mailserver/latest...

FWIW, I use MIAB and my e-mails aren't dropped regularly from what I can tell. Before this, I was using a mix of CPanel and gmail but for a variety of reasons, I wanted to take greater control of my e-mail.

I signed up with a small VPS/hosting provider that offered a decent amount of storage space with their VMs. I don't send spam and have maintained the domain name for a lot of years. I checked the IP for blacklists before migrating the domain to it. I may have had to e-mail one blacklist provider about being removed but if I did, I don't remember it.

Since MIAB sets up DKIM and SPF, your deliverability is pretty good out of the box. I don't send spam and so I think the IP's reputation has been getting better and better over the last few years. The truth is that for personal e-mail, the majority of messages are inbound and that's really not a problem.

The game is far from lost. You need to be able to set PTR, which you can do by sending from a cheap VPS, otherwise basically everything will block you as spam. Other than that, it's not too exclusive, for lack of a better word.

None, if apropriate relays used. Mailchannels or mail.baby for example. The game is never lost if there is active gamers.

So you go through the effort of setting up your own mail server only to send all your outgoing email through a third party? Why even bother at that point?

There's value in running your own inbound server. Some of the big services will silently drop "spam" into the bitbucket. It's just gone. I've had this happen on Microsoft 365 accounts.

By running your own server you can deal with spam as you see fit. I get very little so I deal with it using the "delete" function in my MUA.

Personally I do it because most of the services I tried were dropping mail that I cared about. No amount of "whitelisting" with their provided tools would prevent this. Almost all big inbox providers perform a very early filtering step before even considering user rules and filters.

But I don't want to bother with outbound reputation so I still use relays to send messages.

You can use MailChannels for free via Cloudflare and there are no volume limits.

How can I use relays with Mail-in-a-Box? I couldn't find anything on their install instructions.

Fearmongering.. I have been running my own mail server since 1999. No deliverability issues that I can recall.

I recently set up my mail server using docker-mailserver and I can send stuff to gmail and outlook no problem. Just have to follow instructions and set up DKIM, SPF and PTR records properly.

Yes, sure, Gmail sucks. There is no sense in losing a lot of sleep over it.

Have been running Mailinabox since 2018 on a €5 VPS. 0 issues with email deliverability. Or anything really. It just works.