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Ask HN: Does self-hosting your email mean that you'll be flagged for spam?
I'd like to host my family's emails. Maintenance is not a problem. What I'm concerned about is being flagged for spammed (due to using Digital Ocean or similar). I'd like to know what those of you who self-host can say about that.
There was a related thread two days ago [0].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18511650
- zzo38computer 8y agoI have not had problems with this (although I am going through my ISP's SMTP server to send, using my own SMTP server to receive; if you are installing Exim by the Debian package manager, select "smarthost" from the menu to enable this function) (Also, I use multiple email addresses on my computer, although all of them are my own; I do not host any email for anyone else, although you can just as well use the same software to host email for other people too.)
- dmos62 8y agoNever thought of using a third-party relay SMTP server. That's a great idea. Gmail has a relay [0][1], but I'm not sure if it's still free now that the G Suite free tier is gone. Amazon SES [2] has competitive pricing, or it's free (first 62,000 emails per month) if you're using EC2 for sending email. Then there's a bunch of marketing oriented SMTP providers that have free tiers. E.g. mailjet [3]. [0] https://kinsta.com/knowledgebase/free-smtp-server/ https://kinsta.com/knowledgebase/free-smtp-server/ [1] https://support.google.com/a/answer/2956491?hl=en https://support.google.com/a/answer/2956491?hl=en [2] https://aws.amazon.com/ses/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/ses/pricing/ [3] https://www.mailjet.com/pricing/ https://www.mailjet.com/pricing/
- zzo38computer 8y agoI meant the ISP's server; it should come with your internet service (at no extra charge) if they provide a SMTP server.
- morpheuskafka 8y agoMost people's ISP these days is AWS/GCP/Azure, so that's not an option for most anymore.
- dmos62 8y agoYeah, but I don't have a long-term ISP. Anyway, I don't see any disadvantage in using a non-ISP SMTP relay.
- danieltillett 8y agoYes. In theory no, but in practice the big the providers just randomly disappear a certain percentage of your emails. They don't get marked as junk, just never get to the recipient. After 15 years of running my own email server I gave up and paid one of the commercial suppliers to ensure my emails arrived.
- funkaster 8y agoI do this for my personal email, but use AWS SES for sending. So far, no emails have been flagged/lost.