Pay for Sendgrid (100 / day for free is not enough) VS set up your own email server?

For own email server, do you not get flagged a lot as spam ?

  • BentiGorlich@thebrainbin.org
    2·
    2 years ago

    I wouldnt say that. however setting uo your own mail server is a lot of work, as you have to abide a lot of “security” rules (SPF, DKIM, DMARC, rDNS). Additionally some hosters reuire you to apply for port 25 to be unblocked (e.g. hetzner)

    • oranki
      2·
      2 years ago

      The set up isn’t actually hard at all, if you understand the concepts. Keeping off blacklists is the hard part, as big providers often block entire IP ranges due to one bad actor.

      Edit: I meant sometimes your server gets blacklisted for something some neighboring server did

      • BentiGorlich@thebrainbin.org
        1·
        2 years ago

        Well I did set one up today and the mails land in the spam folder for GMX, GMail and Microsoft (@live.de), although I set up SPF, rDNS, and DKIM. I have to take a look at how to setup DMARC, beacause my domain hoster doesn’t allow free configuration of the TXT entries, you have to use templates and there isn’t one for DMARC

        • oranki
          2·
          2 years ago

          Couple things that I’ve found out,

          • Gmail seems to need your server to have IPv6 with PTR, even if the mail is sent over IPv4
          • Even a DMARC record with no ruf or rua helps lower the spam score
          • For Outlook you need to send some mail to yourself or someone else and mark the messages as not spam manually for a while
          • MS365 will even put mails from Gmail to spam initially
          • Some TLDs like .xyz will go to spam even if everything is set up perfectly
          • Outlook also seems to cache DNS quite long, you may need to wait a day for changes to propagate
          • A recently registered domain will land in spam more easily, if it has been registered for a while it also seems to help

          If you’re not already familiar with these, https://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx (write smtp:your.mx.record is a good tool, and I’ve also used https://www.mail-tester.com/. Mxtoolbox blacklist check is also good.

          I hate it that spammers have made hosting email such a hassle. Hope you get stuff running!

          • hernik@le.mnau.xyz
            1·
            2 years ago

            I don’t have an IPv6 PTR and I send mails through a .xyz domain and everything still works at least when sending to a gmail inbox.

            • oranki
              1·
              2 years ago

              Well, in that case Gmail doesn’t seem to require the PTR6 :)

              None of these are absolute, since determining spam is based on a scoring system

    • hernik@le.mnau.xyz
      1·
      2 years ago

      I managed to set up an SMTP server on my instance, I think I used postfix and dovecot after following some random tutorial. Then followed it with some generic make your mail not fall into spam tutorial to have the DKIM records and whatnot and to my surprise the e-mails reached even my Gmail inbox, which has probably the most strict rules. I must say that setting up postfix with dovecot is the hardest part, at least for me, after that it was just copy-pasting commands and setting some DNS records.