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> An honest list of drawbacks I appreciate putting up a list like this. That said, I want to comment on one of the listed drawbacks: > Occasionally, obscure e

> An honest list of drawbacks I appreciate putting up a list like this. That said, I want to comment on one of the listed drawbacks: > Occasionally, obscure email servers will block emails sent through us I have a few years of experience running my own email server and I can tell you this is a major pain in the ass. When you send your email via a small email server (a server that sends a low volume of email), you will have constant issues getting mail delivered. Also, most of the issues will not be with obscure email servers, they will be with Outlook and Gmail. When you send email, you will never know if your email will be delivered to inbox, delivered to spam folder, or blackholed entirely. Related: > We're not a suitable platform for sending marketing emails (although you should use a dedicated marketing platform anyway). Please explicitly ban people from using your platform to send "marketing email". Clients like that are going to ruin deliverability for your other clients.

shaicoleman 5y ago
> Occasionally, obscure email servers will block emails sent through us The worst offender is Microsoft and their email services (hotmail.com/live.com/outlook.com/etc.). They reject all emails from my server, because it's on DigitalOcean. They are ignoring all requests to unblock my IP address. They don't mark it as spam, they just outright block emails, so you can't even workaround it by checking the spam folder.
- donmcronald 5y ago
  > They don't mark it as spam, they just outright block emails, so you can't even workaround it by checking the spam folder. And there’s no reason for them to do that IMO. They should dump it into the quarantine as high confidence spam. I wonder if the drop shows up in the mail flow logs. I deal with a lot of small businesses and more than once I’ve seen bad spam filtering or silent drops cost people money (upset customers). The spam filters I can understand. The silently dropped messages should get them a class action lawsuit.
  - johnklos 5y ago
    There is a reason - DigitalOcean. A more appropriate name would be DigitalCesspool. They allow anything, so long as you pay them. I'd block email from their networks, but there are already plenty of ways that spam servers on their networks screw up (bad EHLO name, broken reverse DNS, SPF for all IP addresses), so that email is not accepted anyway. Microsoft sucks for rejecting email without recourse, but you're on DigitalOcean, so can you really blame them?
    - donmcronald 5y ago
      I’m not on digital ocean and I don’t know anyone who is. I’m on the receiving end using office 365. Problems I see are for mail coming from shared hosts and isps. IMHO there’s never a reason for Microsoft or Google to drop mail silently if it’s deliverable. Let me decide if I want to do that, but don’t force it on me. Google is awful too. Accounts locked for “suspicious activity” stop accepting incoming mail. I’ve seen people lose a day of email over a weekend before noticing ta false positive account lock. What it really comes down to for me is that I don’t think either of them could act that negligently in a fairer market with better competition.
      - shaicoleman 5y ago
        Things will only change if enough paying customers complain loudly about it.
- Avamander 5y ago
  You think Microsoft blocking you is bad? They ACCEPT mail and drop it afterwards.
  - carlosfvp 5y ago
    Pretty close! They accept the mail returning a "250 OK"ish code, but they delay it for days (or even months) not respecting the SMTP protocol. I actually recevied the emails on Outlook after many many days I have sent them :/ Gmail seems good, I never had issues with Gmail.
    - Avamander 5y ago
      No, not close, it's exactly what they do. Delays are fine by the protocol, it's not a violation, it's not IM.
- johnchristopher 5y ago
  What's Microsoft's rationale ? Has an explanation ever been given ?
  - baobabKoodaa 5y ago
    I've tried reaching Microsoft by phone, email, automated tools for email administrators, and their web forms for requesting whitelisting in email deliverability. Microsoft didn't provide any rational why they are filtering email from small email providers like this, nor did they provide any opportunity to mitigate their filtering.
    - mk89 5y ago
      Probably it's more convenient for them to trust X big players rather than checking one by one. And somehow an empty spam folder looks better than a full one, as it gives the user the feeling that the service itself doesn't receive spam or does a very good job at preventing it.
      - franga2000 5y ago
        That's just the thing: "doing a good job preventing spam" means throwing a lot of stuff in the spam folder. I think everyone would agree that silently dropping emails is bad, even if you're really sure it's spam.
        mk89 5y ago
        I agree, it's just that you're not the average user. I am also surprised to see the spam folder surprisingly empty all the time, almost as if my email addresses were unknown to the world (which I am pretty sure they are not). The average user probably sees this full spam folder as something he/she is doing bad, or the service itself is bad. It's not just google or microsoft. I think most email providers do this, I might be wrong though.
  - stef25 5y ago
    You can create anonymous servers on DO with go-betweens like Bithost, allowing you to pay with cryptocurrency. This is a pretty easy solution for people with bad intentions (bots, scraping, black hat ...) I run my own VPN on DO and almost always get hit by ReCaptcha. Even Google.com will put up a "we've noticed some unusual traffic from" page. Some sites like Zalando completely block me with just a plaintext error page.
- daitangio 5y ago
  I have the same problem, but they fixed it. I opened a issue and a kindly guy did some checks and then removed the ban.
  - shaicoleman 5y ago
    Was it recent? I've had no issues whitelisting my IP in the past, but all my requests in the last 6 months have been ignored.
- tzs 5y ago
  My emails from my domains to my Outlook account were going straight to spam. I tried marking them as not spam, to see if it would learn. A dozen later--no change. I tried replying to them, to see if it could figure out that if I'm actually regularly corresponding with someone they should not be marked as spam. No change. I tried whitelisting the domain. No change.
Felz 5y ago
Marketing emails are actually against the terms of service, although there are grey areas- like a user personally reaches out to offer people a service, and some occasionally end up marked as spam. If the rate is low enough, it might be acceptable. I'll make a note to make that language stronger.
herbst 5y ago
I ran a kinda similar platform years ago I and I fully agree. It was a constant fight against blacklists, random spam filtering and weird attacks on my server looking for postfix missconfigurations. If I learned anything in that time is that email is not simple, and should be run by a qualified dedicated team, because there are so many pitfalls
lazyweb 5y ago
> I have a few years of experience running my own email server and I can tell you this is a major pain in the ass. When you send your email via a small email server (a server that sends a low volume of email), you will have constant issues getting mail delivered. Also, most of the issues will not be with obscure email servers, they will be with Outlook and Gmail. When you send email, you will never know if your email will be delivered to inbox, delivered to spam folder, or blackholed entirely. I tend to disagree, due to my experiences with running a private mail server [1]. I've had one exactly one issue with Outlook/Hotmail servers over the years. My server is quite low traffic, but it's been delivering mail reliably. How do I know? When I send mails, there's usually follow-ups. [1] https://jschumacher.info/2021/05/running-a-private-mail-server-for-six-years-easy-peasy/ https://jschumacher.info/2021/05/running-a-private-mail-serv...
- mpol 5y ago
  This is my experience too with a private server, but I did need SPF, DKIM and Dmarc. These 3 things do require some expertise, but running a mail server already requires that. So it just needs extra time :)
  - zbuf 5y ago
    More than just SPF, DKIM and DMARC; mails still get silently discarded if you come from an IP address with a poor reputation. For this reason most of the large VM hosting providers will work but not give great results.
  - baobabKoodaa 5y ago
    Nope, setting up SPF, DKIM and DMARC is not enough to get your email delivered. I wrote about my experience more here: https://www.attejuvonen.fi/dont-send-email-from-your-own-server/ https://www.attejuvonen.fi/dont-send-email-from-your-own-ser...
    - zbuf 5y ago
      The irony is that most of the spam I get these days comes from Amazon's AWS SMTP service.
kyriakos 5y ago
Email deliverability is monopolised among the big players. Running your own email server and actually keeping your emails outside spam folders is more than one person's full time job. Partly this is not the big players fault but to say they don't benefit from it would be a lie.
layer8 5y ago
> When you send your email via a small email server (a server that sends a low volume of email), you will have constant issues getting mail delivered. That’s hyperbole. I‘ve been running my personal mail server on a VPS for the past 20 years and never had any delivery issues. It may depend on the hosting provider you use, and nowadays you probably need to have DKIM etc., but there are a lot of people running their own mail server without issues.
- baobabKoodaa 5y ago
  > That’s hyperbole. I‘ve been running my personal mail server on a VPS for the past 20 years and never had any delivery issues. No email server in the world can deliver 100% (not even Gmail). Here you are claiming to have done that for 20 years straight. Well, it's not true. In fact, I'll venture as far as to guess that you've never even measured your deliverability.
  - layer8 5y ago
    I’m saying that for all practical purposes I never had an issue. That is, I don’t recollect any case where it turned out that someone didn’t get my email. That’s not to say that it didn’t ever happen in cases that went unnoticed by me, but if so it was rare enough to be a non-issue.
- vgeek 5y ago
  https://www.mail-tester.com/ https://www.mail-tester.com/ is a useful tool for testing. Gmail is hit or miss, even when dkim/spf/dmarc are setup correctly. It may work 70% of the time, but it becomes a constant guessing game if you inboxed or went to spam. If you're using DO/Vultr/Linode, there may be issues with noisy neighbor IPs, but it still sucks that you may get penalized for no fault of your own. It seems like there is no incentive for Gmail to play friendly with small mail servers.
  - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
    > https://www.mail-tester.com/ https://www.mail-tester.com/ is a useful tool for testing. This is great! Thank you!. I scored 2.7 out of 10. I'm using NameCheap's Private Email service. What a waste!
mike-cardwell 5y ago
/me looks at his work gmail account that regularly spam filters emails from github, and emails from his work google apps domain that pass DMARC, DKIM and SPF. Nobody can send emails to Gmail with any certainty. Not even Google.
- corobo 5y ago
  Whenever I'm expecting YouTube emails (pass reset or whatever) I check gmail's spam first haha. At least they don't play favourites I guess.
- kl4m 5y ago
  It's bad enough that Google Drive/Docs notifications are treated as "external senders" so you have to open up your internal Google Groups to the world; then Google Groups flags them as spam anyway! I'm guessing spammers may use Google Docs comments as a platform, but have never seen actual unsolicited Docs comments.
  - krapht 5y ago
    In my experience, it is more they "share" spam documents with you.
toomanybeersies 5y ago
My personal email is on a .xyz domain and I used to use Gandi webmail as it was free with the domain name. When I was finding a new job last year, every time sent recruiters an email with my resume (attached as a pdf), I had to ring them afterwards to check if they had actually received it. I ended up switching to Google Workspace, just so that my emails actually had a chance of not landing in the recipients spam folder.
- black6 5y ago
  I've run into this same issue communicating with potential employers via GANDI mail--more often then not when I make a followup call my email is in their SPAM folder. My sister-in-law's employer's mail service (k-12 school district) ALWAYS bounces back email from myself and my wife, and their sysadmin always says "Nope. Not a problem on my end."
- kureikain 5y ago
  This isn't actually Gandi fault. The amount of spam come from .xyz .top .cam etc are too hight and sysadmin usually factor domain tld into spam scoring. so using a .com may increase your chance hitting inbox actually.
wolrah 5y ago
> Also, most of the issues will not be with obscure email servers, they will be with Outlook and Gmail. When you send email, you will never know if your email will be delivered to inbox, delivered to spam folder, or blackholed entirely. In my personal experience, over five years of running my own business and personal email entirely and another decade and counting since of running PBXes that directly send voicemail messages, Gmail has only explicitly blocked me once, and that was 100% legitimate because the site the PBX was located at had an infected PC. It occasionally will filter messages to the spam folder, but that almost always means one of the users actually flagged a message. I could send an email to myself from a bogus address via raw SMTP over Telnet to port 25 and I'd be willing to bet my week's pay that Gmail delivers it. They might mark it as spam, but they deliver reliably. Microsoft on the other hand is a massive pain in my ass. They usually work, but about 4-5 times a year they seem to randomly pick one of my systems to treat as suspicious and block emails from. The process listed in their block message always works, but it's annoying to have to deal with regularly, especially with no rhyme or reason. Yahoo is the worst, they straight up block everything I do with no recourse. I have one user who insists on using his Yahoo email and I basically had to tell him we don't care that Yahoo won't accept messages.
- dqv 5y ago
  Do you/did you have feedback loop accounts setup for all of them? Yahoo, for example, sends a notification to sys@ (or whatever email you tell them to) when someone marks one of our emails as spam or when it thinks we're sending bulk email. They also have sender support. They did want me to set up something where we used the same connection to send email to them. I forgot My "blacklisted" email company is Zoho because they consistently greylisted and blocked our correspondence with clients and have no one to contact to resolve email issues for senders.
  - ZohoMailSupport 5y ago
    Hi there! I'm contacting you from the Zoho Mail team. Please drop an email to support <AT> zohomail <DOT> com with the sending server logs & IP address. Our technical team will analyze and get back to you with a potential resolution. Thanks!
_jal 5y ago
> you will have constant issues getting mail delivered. I run my own obscure mail server and have not had an issue in years, except for ATT[1]. I'm super low volume - I run mail for about 20 humans, a few mailing lists, and some other automation that does things with email. I do things correctly - I mean, I run nearly the same stack/configuration (scaled way down) as I do professionally for my employer, which delivers 8 digits of messages a day all over. But that doesn't explain why I don't have problems and others do - lots of people get this right and still have problems. And I think that comes down to the fact that mine has been on the net since the mid-90s. So, unfortunately, I suspect the answer to a lot of these problems is 'exist for long time' - until your MX is associated with a bias towards "not spam" in everyone's filters. I can think of ways for existing mail servers to vouch for new ones, but I don't think there's any reason for established ones to want to do that, so it wouldn't work. I'm not sure what the answer is. [1] And after many, many years of attempting to resolve it, they can bite me. I got annoyed enough that they get a custom bounce from me now on the rare occasions someone tries to spam me through them.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
  > And I think that comes down to the fact that mine has been on the net since the mid-90s There are other factors like IP reputation of the email server sending the email. And if you’re using a hosted service, there’s no way to control those IP addresses.
- zahllos 5y ago
  I've been operating my own mail server on the same IP for the last 10 years, so not as long as yours and I also don't have problems. I also disagree with one of the parent comments that you will never know what happens to email: Gmail supports DMARC, and will give you stats and tell you what happens. You can also sign up to various sender services and domain whitelist sites and so on. I've also seen mail providers do fun things like 'permanently defer' email as a means of blocking and this actually notifies you, albeit in a disruptive way, by leaving the email permanently in your outgoing queue. I do agree however IP reputation matters. If you share an IP with other hosters, or your IP has been recycled from a bad reputation IP, or you have a residential IP or have found your way onto any of the email spam lists recently, or been reported for abuse or marked as spam enough times by freemail service users, you may have trouble getting to 'inbox' and eventually even getting delivered. Reporting systems like DMARC should let you know, however, before it becomes serious. I don't think running your own email is a high maintenance activity that some suggest (especially for small servers) but it is definitely more effort than outsourcing it to someone else. I'm glad services like this exist, if only to prevent email becoming a Microsoft-Google walled garden.
TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
I moved my custom email domain from gmail to NameCheap’s Private Email about a year ago. I wanted to free myself from the possibility that Google might arbitrarily ban me one day, as we’ve seen happen to people for various Google products for no reason and with no appeal. Biggest mistake of my life. Just as you say, I have no idea if my emails get through. The number of times I’ve had people tell me they found my email in a spam folder or just not at all is unacceptable. And you’re right, this is most prominent on outlook and gmail users but not exclusive to them. How would you like your accountant or lawyer to miss your emails? It happens to me all the time now. These are not emails with cat pics. I’m scared to move back, fearing an IMAP migration will cause me to lose a year of emails sent and received. I don’t know what to do.
- Brian_K_White 5y ago
  I think all you really need is to own your domain. If you manage your domain and point your mx at google, and some ai decides your drive contents look bad or some non-official youtube app violates some api access rule and they kill your whole account, you just point your at any other service provider. That will be an annoying few days, but you don't lose anything too important. Maybe for a day or so you can't receive password emails, but you will, just after the switch shakes out. In the mean time, you're enjoying the convenience of a big mail service, and playing the odds that it's probably not going to happen to you, and it's ok to live with that risk because if it happens, it's just an inconvenience not a disaster. As for losing old emails, I use thunderbird on my laptop, and that ends up getting a copy of all my gmail even though I also read those same emails on my phone. If google kills my account, I still have all my old emails even without my own domain. I don't know if google even offers domain regisration to individuals, but if they do, I just wouldn't use them for the registrar. All other services can tolerate that risk as long as you use someone else as registrar (namecheap is good).
  - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
    Thanks for the reply. I thought IMAP servers keep the messages on the server, not on the client. Is that incorrect?

shaicoleman 5y ago

> Occasionally, obscure email servers will block emails sent through us The worst offender is Microsoft and their email services (hotmail.com/live.com/outlook.com/etc.). They reject all emails from my server, because it's on DigitalOcean. They are ignoring all requests to unblock my IP address. They don't mark it as spam, they just outright block emails, so you can't even workaround it by checking the spam folder.

donmcronald 5y ago
> They don't mark it as spam, they just outright block emails, so you can't even workaround it by checking the spam folder. And there’s no reason for them to do that IMO. They should dump it into the quarantine as high confidence spam. I wonder if the drop shows up in the mail flow logs. I deal with a lot of small businesses and more than once I’ve seen bad spam filtering or silent drops cost people money (upset customers). The spam filters I can understand. The silently dropped messages should get them a class action lawsuit.
- johnklos 5y ago
  There is a reason - DigitalOcean. A more appropriate name would be DigitalCesspool. They allow anything, so long as you pay them. I'd block email from their networks, but there are already plenty of ways that spam servers on their networks screw up (bad EHLO name, broken reverse DNS, SPF for all IP addresses), so that email is not accepted anyway. Microsoft sucks for rejecting email without recourse, but you're on DigitalOcean, so can you really blame them?
  - donmcronald 5y ago
    I’m not on digital ocean and I don’t know anyone who is. I’m on the receiving end using office 365. Problems I see are for mail coming from shared hosts and isps. IMHO there’s never a reason for Microsoft or Google to drop mail silently if it’s deliverable. Let me decide if I want to do that, but don’t force it on me. Google is awful too. Accounts locked for “suspicious activity” stop accepting incoming mail. I’ve seen people lose a day of email over a weekend before noticing ta false positive account lock. What it really comes down to for me is that I don’t think either of them could act that negligently in a fairer market with better competition.
    - shaicoleman 5y ago
      Things will only change if enough paying customers complain loudly about it.
Avamander 5y ago
You think Microsoft blocking you is bad? They ACCEPT mail and drop it afterwards.
- carlosfvp 5y ago
  Pretty close! They accept the mail returning a "250 OK"ish code, but they delay it for days (or even months) not respecting the SMTP protocol. I actually recevied the emails on Outlook after many many days I have sent them :/ Gmail seems good, I never had issues with Gmail.
  - Avamander 5y ago
    No, not close, it's exactly what they do. Delays are fine by the protocol, it's not a violation, it's not IM.
johnchristopher 5y ago
What's Microsoft's rationale ? Has an explanation ever been given ?
- baobabKoodaa 5y ago
  I've tried reaching Microsoft by phone, email, automated tools for email administrators, and their web forms for requesting whitelisting in email deliverability. Microsoft didn't provide any rational why they are filtering email from small email providers like this, nor did they provide any opportunity to mitigate their filtering.
  - mk89 5y ago
    Probably it's more convenient for them to trust X big players rather than checking one by one. And somehow an empty spam folder looks better than a full one, as it gives the user the feeling that the service itself doesn't receive spam or does a very good job at preventing it.
    - franga2000 5y ago
      That's just the thing: "doing a good job preventing spam" means throwing a lot of stuff in the spam folder. I think everyone would agree that silently dropping emails is bad, even if you're really sure it's spam.
      - mk89 5y ago
        I agree, it's just that you're not the average user. I am also surprised to see the spam folder surprisingly empty all the time, almost as if my email addresses were unknown to the world (which I am pretty sure they are not). The average user probably sees this full spam folder as something he/she is doing bad, or the service itself is bad. It's not just google or microsoft. I think most email providers do this, I might be wrong though.
- stef25 5y ago
  You can create anonymous servers on DO with go-betweens like Bithost, allowing you to pay with cryptocurrency. This is a pretty easy solution for people with bad intentions (bots, scraping, black hat ...) I run my own VPN on DO and almost always get hit by ReCaptcha. Even Google.com will put up a "we've noticed some unusual traffic from" page. Some sites like Zalando completely block me with just a plaintext error page.
daitangio 5y ago
I have the same problem, but they fixed it. I opened a issue and a kindly guy did some checks and then removed the ban.
- shaicoleman 5y ago
  Was it recent? I've had no issues whitelisting my IP in the past, but all my requests in the last 6 months have been ignored.
tzs 5y ago
My emails from my domains to my Outlook account were going straight to spam. I tried marking them as not spam, to see if it would learn. A dozen later--no change. I tried replying to them, to see if it could figure out that if I'm actually regularly corresponding with someone they should not be marked as spam. No change. I tried whitelisting the domain. No change.

Felz 5y ago

Marketing emails are actually against the terms of service, although there are grey areas- like a user personally reaches out to offer people a service, and some occasionally end up marked as spam. If the rate is low enough, it might be acceptable. I'll make a note to make that language stronger.

herbst 5y ago

I ran a kinda similar platform years ago I and I fully agree. It was a constant fight against blacklists, random spam filtering and weird attacks on my server looking for postfix missconfigurations. If I learned anything in that time is that email is not simple, and should be run by a qualified dedicated team, because there are so many pitfalls

lazyweb 5y ago

> I have a few years of experience running my own email server and I can tell you this is a major pain in the ass. When you send your email via a small email server (a server that sends a low volume of email), you will have constant issues getting mail delivered. Also, most of the issues will not be with obscure email servers, they will be with Outlook and Gmail. When you send email, you will never know if your email will be delivered to inbox, delivered to spam folder, or blackholed entirely. I tend to disagree, due to my experiences with running a private mail server [1]. I've had one exactly one issue with Outlook/Hotmail servers over the years. My server is quite low traffic, but it's been delivering mail reliably. How do I know? When I send mails, there's usually follow-ups. [1] https://jschumacher.info/2021/05/running-a-private-mail-server-for-six-years-easy-peasy/ https://jschumacher.info/2021/05/running-a-private-mail-serv...

mpol 5y ago
This is my experience too with a private server, but I did need SPF, DKIM and Dmarc. These 3 things do require some expertise, but running a mail server already requires that. So it just needs extra time :)
- zbuf 5y ago
  More than just SPF, DKIM and DMARC; mails still get silently discarded if you come from an IP address with a poor reputation. For this reason most of the large VM hosting providers will work but not give great results.
- baobabKoodaa 5y ago
  Nope, setting up SPF, DKIM and DMARC is not enough to get your email delivered. I wrote about my experience more here: https://www.attejuvonen.fi/dont-send-email-from-your-own-server/ https://www.attejuvonen.fi/dont-send-email-from-your-own-ser...
  - zbuf 5y ago
    The irony is that most of the spam I get these days comes from Amazon's AWS SMTP service.

kyriakos 5y ago

Email deliverability is monopolised among the big players. Running your own email server and actually keeping your emails outside spam folders is more than one person's full time job. Partly this is not the big players fault but to say they don't benefit from it would be a lie.

layer8 5y ago

> When you send your email via a small email server (a server that sends a low volume of email), you will have constant issues getting mail delivered. That’s hyperbole. I‘ve been running my personal mail server on a VPS for the past 20 years and never had any delivery issues. It may depend on the hosting provider you use, and nowadays you probably need to have DKIM etc., but there are a lot of people running their own mail server without issues.

baobabKoodaa 5y ago
> That’s hyperbole. I‘ve been running my personal mail server on a VPS for the past 20 years and never had any delivery issues. No email server in the world can deliver 100% (not even Gmail). Here you are claiming to have done that for 20 years straight. Well, it's not true. In fact, I'll venture as far as to guess that you've never even measured your deliverability.
- layer8 5y ago
  I’m saying that for all practical purposes I never had an issue. That is, I don’t recollect any case where it turned out that someone didn’t get my email. That’s not to say that it didn’t ever happen in cases that went unnoticed by me, but if so it was rare enough to be a non-issue.
vgeek 5y ago
https://www.mail-tester.com/ https://www.mail-tester.com/ is a useful tool for testing. Gmail is hit or miss, even when dkim/spf/dmarc are setup correctly. It may work 70% of the time, but it becomes a constant guessing game if you inboxed or went to spam. If you're using DO/Vultr/Linode, there may be issues with noisy neighbor IPs, but it still sucks that you may get penalized for no fault of your own. It seems like there is no incentive for Gmail to play friendly with small mail servers.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
  > https://www.mail-tester.com/ https://www.mail-tester.com/ is a useful tool for testing. This is great! Thank you!. I scored 2.7 out of 10. I'm using NameCheap's Private Email service. What a waste!

mike-cardwell 5y ago

/me looks at his work gmail account that regularly spam filters emails from github, and emails from his work google apps domain that pass DMARC, DKIM and SPF. Nobody can send emails to Gmail with any certainty. Not even Google.

corobo 5y ago
Whenever I'm expecting YouTube emails (pass reset or whatever) I check gmail's spam first haha. At least they don't play favourites I guess.
kl4m 5y ago
It's bad enough that Google Drive/Docs notifications are treated as "external senders" so you have to open up your internal Google Groups to the world; then Google Groups flags them as spam anyway! I'm guessing spammers may use Google Docs comments as a platform, but have never seen actual unsolicited Docs comments.
- krapht 5y ago
  In my experience, it is more they "share" spam documents with you.

toomanybeersies 5y ago

My personal email is on a .xyz domain and I used to use Gandi webmail as it was free with the domain name. When I was finding a new job last year, every time sent recruiters an email with my resume (attached as a pdf), I had to ring them afterwards to check if they had actually received it. I ended up switching to Google Workspace, just so that my emails actually had a chance of not landing in the recipients spam folder.

black6 5y ago
I've run into this same issue communicating with potential employers via GANDI mail--more often then not when I make a followup call my email is in their SPAM folder. My sister-in-law's employer's mail service (k-12 school district) ALWAYS bounces back email from myself and my wife, and their sysadmin always says "Nope. Not a problem on my end."
kureikain 5y ago
This isn't actually Gandi fault. The amount of spam come from .xyz .top .cam etc are too hight and sysadmin usually factor domain tld into spam scoring. so using a .com may increase your chance hitting inbox actually.

wolrah 5y ago

> Also, most of the issues will not be with obscure email servers, they will be with Outlook and Gmail. When you send email, you will never know if your email will be delivered to inbox, delivered to spam folder, or blackholed entirely. In my personal experience, over five years of running my own business and personal email entirely and another decade and counting since of running PBXes that directly send voicemail messages, Gmail has only explicitly blocked me once, and that was 100% legitimate because the site the PBX was located at had an infected PC. It occasionally will filter messages to the spam folder, but that almost always means one of the users actually flagged a message. I could send an email to myself from a bogus address via raw SMTP over Telnet to port 25 and I'd be willing to bet my week's pay that Gmail delivers it. They might mark it as spam, but they deliver reliably. Microsoft on the other hand is a massive pain in my ass. They usually work, but about 4-5 times a year they seem to randomly pick one of my systems to treat as suspicious and block emails from. The process listed in their block message always works, but it's annoying to have to deal with regularly, especially with no rhyme or reason. Yahoo is the worst, they straight up block everything I do with no recourse. I have one user who insists on using his Yahoo email and I basically had to tell him we don't care that Yahoo won't accept messages.

dqv 5y ago
Do you/did you have feedback loop accounts setup for all of them? Yahoo, for example, sends a notification to sys@ (or whatever email you tell them to) when someone marks one of our emails as spam or when it thinks we're sending bulk email. They also have sender support. They did want me to set up something where we used the same connection to send email to them. I forgot My "blacklisted" email company is Zoho because they consistently greylisted and blocked our correspondence with clients and have no one to contact to resolve email issues for senders.
- ZohoMailSupport 5y ago
  Hi there! I'm contacting you from the Zoho Mail team. Please drop an email to support <AT> zohomail <DOT> com with the sending server logs & IP address. Our technical team will analyze and get back to you with a potential resolution. Thanks!

_jal 5y ago

> you will have constant issues getting mail delivered. I run my own obscure mail server and have not had an issue in years, except for ATT[1]. I'm super low volume - I run mail for about 20 humans, a few mailing lists, and some other automation that does things with email. I do things correctly - I mean, I run nearly the same stack/configuration (scaled way down) as I do professionally for my employer, which delivers 8 digits of messages a day all over. But that doesn't explain why I don't have problems and others do - lots of people get this right and still have problems. And I think that comes down to the fact that mine has been on the net since the mid-90s. So, unfortunately, I suspect the answer to a lot of these problems is 'exist for long time' - until your MX is associated with a bias towards "not spam" in everyone's filters. I can think of ways for existing mail servers to vouch for new ones, but I don't think there's any reason for established ones to want to do that, so it wouldn't work. I'm not sure what the answer is. [1] And after many, many years of attempting to resolve it, they can bite me. I got annoyed enough that they get a custom bounce from me now on the rare occasions someone tries to spam me through them.

deleted 5y ago
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TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
> And I think that comes down to the fact that mine has been on the net since the mid-90s There are other factors like IP reputation of the email server sending the email. And if you’re using a hosted service, there’s no way to control those IP addresses.
zahllos 5y ago
I've been operating my own mail server on the same IP for the last 10 years, so not as long as yours and I also don't have problems. I also disagree with one of the parent comments that you will never know what happens to email: Gmail supports DMARC, and will give you stats and tell you what happens. You can also sign up to various sender services and domain whitelist sites and so on. I've also seen mail providers do fun things like 'permanently defer' email as a means of blocking and this actually notifies you, albeit in a disruptive way, by leaving the email permanently in your outgoing queue. I do agree however IP reputation matters. If you share an IP with other hosters, or your IP has been recycled from a bad reputation IP, or you have a residential IP or have found your way onto any of the email spam lists recently, or been reported for abuse or marked as spam enough times by freemail service users, you may have trouble getting to 'inbox' and eventually even getting delivered. Reporting systems like DMARC should let you know, however, before it becomes serious. I don't think running your own email is a high maintenance activity that some suggest (especially for small servers) but it is definitely more effort than outsourcing it to someone else. I'm glad services like this exist, if only to prevent email becoming a Microsoft-Google walled garden.

TedDoesntTalk 5y ago

I moved my custom email domain from gmail to NameCheap’s Private Email about a year ago. I wanted to free myself from the possibility that Google might arbitrarily ban me one day, as we’ve seen happen to people for various Google products for no reason and with no appeal. Biggest mistake of my life. Just as you say, I have no idea if my emails get through. The number of times I’ve had people tell me they found my email in a spam folder or just not at all is unacceptable. And you’re right, this is most prominent on outlook and gmail users but not exclusive to them. How would you like your accountant or lawyer to miss your emails? It happens to me all the time now. These are not emails with cat pics. I’m scared to move back, fearing an IMAP migration will cause me to lose a year of emails sent and received. I don’t know what to do.

Brian_K_White 5y ago
I think all you really need is to own your domain. If you manage your domain and point your mx at google, and some ai decides your drive contents look bad or some non-official youtube app violates some api access rule and they kill your whole account, you just point your at any other service provider. That will be an annoying few days, but you don't lose anything too important. Maybe for a day or so you can't receive password emails, but you will, just after the switch shakes out. In the mean time, you're enjoying the convenience of a big mail service, and playing the odds that it's probably not going to happen to you, and it's ok to live with that risk because if it happens, it's just an inconvenience not a disaster. As for losing old emails, I use thunderbird on my laptop, and that ends up getting a copy of all my gmail even though I also read those same emails on my phone. If google kills my account, I still have all my old emails even without my own domain. I don't know if google even offers domain regisration to individuals, but if they do, I just wouldn't use them for the registrar. All other services can tolerate that risk as long as you use someone else as registrar (namecheap is good).
- TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
  Thanks for the reply. I thought IMAP servers keep the messages on the server, not on the client. Is that incorrect?