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It's not reliable. Large providers will black hole you and you don't know until someone says they never got an email. Even following all the rules you get hit a

It's not reliable. Large providers will black hole you and you don't know until someone says they never got an email. Even following all the rules you get hit and with Google, Microsoft, &c it's impossible to get to anyone to resolve the issue once you know about it. Even for small companies this is a nightmare.

gsich 6y ago
Haven't have any issues. "You can't self host email" is the bad HN meme.
megous 6y ago
Big providers are not reliable either. It's a symetrical problem. If they don't deliver messages, they are not reliable from both sender and recipient PoV. And you don't have any control over what they blackhole or reject without even delivering to your inbox/spam folder, if you're their user. You don't get to see logs either. And big benefit of self-hosting is that you can actually make your server receive everything with no rejection or blackholing. So in that sense, self-hosting can actually be made extremely reliable for reception, and that is much more important to me than reliable sending. So I'd say self-hosting is superior when it comes to reliability, because at least you can make one direction "100%" reliable. With big freemail you can't make any direction comparably reliable. As soon as you get some IP address reputation, sending gets fairly reliable too. And it will also work fine without any modern cruft on top. You really don't need spf, dkim, dmarc or any of that, for your personal e-mails to be delivered. Kinda unfortunate that others sometimes block you when you're starting out just based on your IP address [range], so it's discouraging, but it mostly works after a while.
- im3w1l 6y ago
  > Big providers are not reliable either. It's a symetrical problem. If they don't deliver messages, they are not reliable from both sender and recipient PoV. It's symmetric in the sense that if Alice can't communicate with Bob, then Bob can't communicate with Alice. But network effects break the symmetry. If you have a big provider you can reliably communicate with 99.99% of people. If you have a small provider you can reliably communicate with 95% of people. *Numbers made up to illustrate the point.
  - megous 6y ago
    My use case is also to receive e-mails from non gmail/outlook users. In fact if I check my logs 1.5% of messages came from google's smtp service and 1 from outlook, out of last 15000 emails. So if big provider drops 95% of incomming emails from non-big providers into black void, their service is less than useless to me, and their quality would be at par with small providers that can deliver 95% emails successfully.

gsich 6y ago

Haven't have any issues. "You can't self host email" is the bad HN meme.

megous 6y ago

Big providers are not reliable either. It's a symetrical problem. If they don't deliver messages, they are not reliable from both sender and recipient PoV. And you don't have any control over what they blackhole or reject without even delivering to your inbox/spam folder, if you're their user. You don't get to see logs either. And big benefit of self-hosting is that you can actually make your server receive everything with no rejection or blackholing. So in that sense, self-hosting can actually be made extremely reliable for reception, and that is much more important to me than reliable sending. So I'd say self-hosting is superior when it comes to reliability, because at least you can make one direction "100%" reliable. With big freemail you can't make any direction comparably reliable. As soon as you get some IP address reputation, sending gets fairly reliable too. And it will also work fine without any modern cruft on top. You really don't need spf, dkim, dmarc or any of that, for your personal e-mails to be delivered. Kinda unfortunate that others sometimes block you when you're starting out just based on your IP address [range], so it's discouraging, but it mostly works after a while.

im3w1l 6y ago
> Big providers are not reliable either. It's a symetrical problem. If they don't deliver messages, they are not reliable from both sender and recipient PoV. It's symmetric in the sense that if Alice can't communicate with Bob, then Bob can't communicate with Alice. But network effects break the symmetry. If you have a big provider you can reliably communicate with 99.99% of people. If you have a small provider you can reliably communicate with 95% of people. *Numbers made up to illustrate the point.
- megous 6y ago
  My use case is also to receive e-mails from non gmail/outlook users. In fact if I check my logs 1.5% of messages came from google's smtp service and 1 from outlook, out of last 15000 emails. So if big provider drops 95% of incomming emails from non-big providers into black void, their service is less than useless to me, and their quality would be at par with small providers that can deliver 95% emails successfully.