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To send 4k emails a month a 1€/month VPS running Exim is enough and takes 1h to set up. The real advantage is to have control over your own infrastructure and

To send 4k emails a month a 1€/month VPS running Exim is enough and takes 1h to set up. The real advantage is to have control over your own infrastructure and ensure the privacy of your reader base. The drawback is having to monitor blocklists and the reputation of your server IP address.

ghaff 5y ago
>The drawback is having to monitor blocklists and the reputation of your server IP address. Which sound like big drawbacks for anything reasonably serious. Maybe if you're doing this at scale for clients but, then, you're potentially exposed to clients who can cause problems that affect other clients.
sneak 5y ago
Deliverability is a thing. When most of your list recipients are on gmail, this is a good way to end up in spam for all of them. People who believe this is a viable method to reach the inboxes of thousands of gmail users have never tried.
- Silhouette 5y ago
  Sadly, this says more about how broken GMail now is than anything else. Real Soon Now(TM), the tech community needs to start a serious campaign to shame and isolate email providers that do not reliably deliver legitimate emails, regardless of how high profile they are. It probably needs meaningful government/regulator backing to get anywhere. The odd false positive on spam/malware filtering is understandable, it's not a perfect science, but the reality today is that a lot of these services simply don't work properly and the unreliability is probably causing some degree of damage to huge numbers of people and businesses. Email is far too important for far too many things to let the reliability continue to degrade according to the arbitrary whims of a few large mail services and to permit oligopoly effects to lock new or small-time providers out of the system almost entirely.
  - sneak 5y ago
    “the tech community” doesn’t matter: users chose gmail. Shaming them won’t do anything, because the users are the ones whose choices matter.
    - Silhouette 5y ago
      But the users might make different choices if they knew how often mail they probably want to receive isn't reaching them. The problem at the moment is that the failures are largely silent from the user's point of view. To be fair to GMail, although it's obnoxiously aggressive with classifying things as spam, as far as I know it doesn't silently drop incoming mail without notifying either the sender or recipient, which is the worst thing that some major ISPs do. I have had customers contact my business to ask for help with something, and we send them a quick reply answering their question, and then the next day we get a frustrated follow-up asking why we are ignoring them, and this continues for another round or two until they give up on buying something from us or cancel a subscription. I have had friends send me a reply a month after a big party saying they're sorry they didn't make it but they only just found the invitation and the follow-up I sent them in their junk folder. Those sorts of cases are annoying and seem to happen all the time these days, but imagine if a missing email was something really important from your doctor or your kid's school.
      - sneak 5y ago
        Your doctor already pays the whitelisted email deliverability cartel, or their email hosting service does. You're free to try to educate users now, if you like, but most people receive emails only from a small group of hosting companies.
        Silhouette 5y ago
        And you don't think it's a problem that many people might not receive some legitimate emails at all? Or you just don't think that anything can be done to improve the situation now?
dvfjsdhgfv 5y ago
> To send 4k emails a month a 1€/month VPS running Exim is enough and takes 1h to set up. You can use a VPS for web projects. For e-mail you'd want a dedicated server with a separate IP that is going to cost you €40/month. Yes it may take 1h to set up, but gaining reputation takes time - you definitely won't be able to reach all recipients within one hour of purchasing the server.
- ex_amazon_sde 5y ago
  I've done it and it worked. Without the €40/month.
- PurpleFoxy 5y ago
  No VPS has a shared IP address. The real problem is that the pool may have been dirtied by previous customers. But once you get a clean IP you can keep it for as long as you keep the service running. I sent emails from a VPS for years without issues. I stopped purely because Fastmail had better software and cheaper storage.
  - Silhouette 5y ago
    Hopefully as IPv6 takes over, the contamination effect due to some unknown party who might once have used the same IP address will become less of an issue. Although you have to wonder whether the kind of big mail service that will swing the blacklist axe first and probably not ask questions later with IPv4 addresses is just going to start blocking entire service provider ranges with IPv6 to counter that, causing the same problems for legitimate senders with new systems anyway.
- krono 5y ago
  Absolutely overkill to have a metal server at that cost to send emails. A cheap VPS (which always comes with its own IP) is fine in most cases. From experience I can confirm the reputation build-up requirement though. And all that reputation can get ruined by a single blacklisting - even if you manage to get the server de-listed later the damage is done.

ghaff 5y ago

>The drawback is having to monitor blocklists and the reputation of your server IP address. Which sound like big drawbacks for anything reasonably serious. Maybe if you're doing this at scale for clients but, then, you're potentially exposed to clients who can cause problems that affect other clients.

sneak 5y ago

Deliverability is a thing. When most of your list recipients are on gmail, this is a good way to end up in spam for all of them. People who believe this is a viable method to reach the inboxes of thousands of gmail users have never tried.

Silhouette 5y ago
Sadly, this says more about how broken GMail now is than anything else. Real Soon Now(TM), the tech community needs to start a serious campaign to shame and isolate email providers that do not reliably deliver legitimate emails, regardless of how high profile they are. It probably needs meaningful government/regulator backing to get anywhere. The odd false positive on spam/malware filtering is understandable, it's not a perfect science, but the reality today is that a lot of these services simply don't work properly and the unreliability is probably causing some degree of damage to huge numbers of people and businesses. Email is far too important for far too many things to let the reliability continue to degrade according to the arbitrary whims of a few large mail services and to permit oligopoly effects to lock new or small-time providers out of the system almost entirely.
- sneak 5y ago
  “the tech community” doesn’t matter: users chose gmail. Shaming them won’t do anything, because the users are the ones whose choices matter.
  - Silhouette 5y ago
    But the users might make different choices if they knew how often mail they probably want to receive isn't reaching them. The problem at the moment is that the failures are largely silent from the user's point of view. To be fair to GMail, although it's obnoxiously aggressive with classifying things as spam, as far as I know it doesn't silently drop incoming mail without notifying either the sender or recipient, which is the worst thing that some major ISPs do. I have had customers contact my business to ask for help with something, and we send them a quick reply answering their question, and then the next day we get a frustrated follow-up asking why we are ignoring them, and this continues for another round or two until they give up on buying something from us or cancel a subscription. I have had friends send me a reply a month after a big party saying they're sorry they didn't make it but they only just found the invitation and the follow-up I sent them in their junk folder. Those sorts of cases are annoying and seem to happen all the time these days, but imagine if a missing email was something really important from your doctor or your kid's school.
    - sneak 5y ago
      Your doctor already pays the whitelisted email deliverability cartel, or their email hosting service does. You're free to try to educate users now, if you like, but most people receive emails only from a small group of hosting companies.
      - Silhouette 5y ago
        And you don't think it's a problem that many people might not receive some legitimate emails at all? Or you just don't think that anything can be done to improve the situation now?

dvfjsdhgfv 5y ago

> To send 4k emails a month a 1€/month VPS running Exim is enough and takes 1h to set up. You can use a VPS for web projects. For e-mail you'd want a dedicated server with a separate IP that is going to cost you €40/month. Yes it may take 1h to set up, but gaining reputation takes time - you definitely won't be able to reach all recipients within one hour of purchasing the server.

ex_amazon_sde 5y ago
I've done it and it worked. Without the €40/month.
PurpleFoxy 5y ago
No VPS has a shared IP address. The real problem is that the pool may have been dirtied by previous customers. But once you get a clean IP you can keep it for as long as you keep the service running. I sent emails from a VPS for years without issues. I stopped purely because Fastmail had better software and cheaper storage.
- Silhouette 5y ago
  Hopefully as IPv6 takes over, the contamination effect due to some unknown party who might once have used the same IP address will become less of an issue. Although you have to wonder whether the kind of big mail service that will swing the blacklist axe first and probably not ask questions later with IPv4 addresses is just going to start blocking entire service provider ranges with IPv6 to counter that, causing the same problems for legitimate senders with new systems anyway.
krono 5y ago
Absolutely overkill to have a metal server at that cost to send emails. A cheap VPS (which always comes with its own IP) is fine in most cases. From experience I can confirm the reputation build-up requirement though. And all that reputation can get ruined by a single blacklisting - even if you manage to get the server de-listed later the damage is done.