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It's hit and miss. I've been running hosted mail services for years, both for myself and for a handful of other people and businesses. SPF and DKIM are pretty
by thaumaturgy 6y ago
It's hit and miss. I've been running hosted mail services for years, both for myself and for a handful of other people and businesses.
SPF and DKIM are pretty much required now, as are TLS/SSL. From there, it turns into a dice roll. Gmail is terrible about this; they have a totally opaque and very frustrating engine that sometimes filters messages into a junk folder and sometimes doesn't. Outlook.com uses a somewhat more traditional internal RBL, but they are happy to block network segments and they don't offer any way to query their blacklist or request removal from it, so you could do everything right but a neighboring VPS or IP will get you blacklisted anyway. Comcast will simply accept delivery of messages and then disappear them depending on an arrangement of the stars that I haven't quite figured out yet. And those old sbcglobal/Yahoo services users... just, uggghh.
A popular solution is to rely on a third-party service to handle your outbounds. Sendgrid specifically is really bad, they carry way too much junk traffic, so don't go with them if you decide to try this out.
I have a post banging around in my head that's titled "Email is fractally broken", and getting outbound non-spam messages to reliably land in other people's inboxes would be a significant part of that writeup.
- edoceo 6y agoPlease post it when you do
- fastball 6y agoAnecdotally I have to disagree about Sendgrid. Have had no issues with them so far.
- thaumaturgy 6y agoI happen to be running a test with them this week to see what deliverability looks like on their end. So far only 79% of their messages have been accepted for delivery by remote service providers. These are non-spam, non-transactional, typical business correspondence messages. In their activity feed right now, SendGrid traffic is being blocked by comcast, GoDaddy, iCloud, and a cornucopia of smaller services. Here's one of SendGrid's outbound IPs, listed on multiple RBLs used by other services: https://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=blacklist%3a167.89.17.173&run=toolpage https://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=blacklist%3a167.... On the receiving end, I've had to deal with waves of spam from SendGrid for years, and it's especially difficult because they carry a mix of spam and legitimate traffic, so blocking them causes complaints and not blocking them also causes complaints.