I’ve been happily running my own mailserver for ten years, but recently, the overlords (garbageMail and MicroShit) have been blocking my messages. I think I knew the day would come when they successfully push me out of SMTP, and it’s today. I have 100% compliance: SPF, DKIM, TLS, DANE, DMARC, etc. yet everything I send goes to spam. Emails I reply to (with reply headers) go into spam. How can they even justify it?
I don’t want a full inbox (pop/imap). I’m just looking for a privacy-friendly SMTP service for sending mail with reputation. I’m not mass-marketing so pretty much whoever is cheapest per month and respects my privacy.
Looking at like, mailgun, simplelogin, proton? This is so sad.
Afaik one of the parameters that is used to grade remote servers, is how much legitimate mail it has sent recently. This causes small servers to with few emails sent in total each day/week to score higher on spam evaluation.
I’ve read documentation on newsletter services, that if you elect to use a dedicated IP address for your outbound emails, it needs to be “warmed up” over a few weeks with smaller groups of recipients, and that you need to keep a persistent high volume once it’s warm. This helps keep your SMTP host “well-known”, which is somehow more trustworthy.
Of course newsletters and personal email are not the same, but they unfortunately go through the same spam-filters.
I hosted for years and got tired of fighting with the big players servers… then I realized 95% of every email and sent or received was going to or from a person’s Gmail account and gave up.
https://tools.sendmarc.com/ Is a good start. Listen back through the security now eps where he’s setting up his own email list with his own email server.
