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This. I have been facing this issue recently more and more. Account creation emails aren't arriving to my custom domain recently. Some software companies seem t

This. I have been facing this issue recently more and more. Account creation emails aren't arriving to my custom domain recently. Some software companies seem to not send emails to custom domains. I use a well known commercial provider with DKIM and everything setup. Yet. I am beginning to use my custom domain only for human communication and all else gets directed into Gmail.

snazz 4y ago
Huh—I wonder if that has to do with your TLD? I’ve been using custom domains for a few years and I have more issues with my .xyz domain than I do with my .com for both sending and receiving. Both have all the authentication DNS records set up.
- lisper 4y ago
  I run my own email server with a custom spam filter that I wrote and one of the things I've done is blacklist certain TLDs that are so spammy that just this one mitigation cuts my spam by >50%. XYZ is one of those super-spammy TLDs, sorry. Here is the complete list: 'top','tv','biz','rocks','ru','science','bid','date','casa','buzz','xyz','click','online'
  - doodlesdev 4y ago
    I hate you and SpamAssassin. I also completely understand and will probably do the same when self hosting. Sad state of affairs.
  - snazz 4y ago
    No apology needed :) That's why I use the .com for everything serious and I don't have issues sending or receiving with that one.
Semaphor 4y ago
I have zero issues with mail not arriving on my custom .me domain, and I’ve been using it for email for close to 10 years. Do you have an example of sites where account creation mails do not arrive?
- tyingq 4y ago
  That yours has existed for 10 years might be helping you, you established some trust/history before the big providers stopped caring about sink holing false positives.
  - Semaphor 4y ago
    I have never heard of age being important for receiving mail. Sending, yes, as an annoying anti-spam measure, but why would anyone care about it the other way?
smeagull 4y ago
The second worst thing about email after spam, is all the solutions dedicated to fixing spam. I've had to setup DKIM, update records and keep up with changes to it just to keep my custom domain.
derefr 4y ago
> Some software companies seem to not send emails to custom domains. As someone who operates a SaaS that does auto-block some account registrations based on email address, I feel like I should speak to this. We're actually fine with custom domains — and I imagine this is true for most SaaS companies. All our business customers use custom domains; and we're not about to blow holes in our funnel by making it harder to acquire new business customers. There's no logic in our codebase that especially favors the big email providers; no whitelist with gmail/outlook/etc. on it. (And we haven't found that any of the lifecycle-mail sending services we've tried have had trouble with custom domains, either.) Instead, what we're mostly trying to stop is registrations using what you might call vanity or proxy domains — domains created by people who are only trying to obscure their real email address, but who aren't willing to invest the effort to make their domain into a "real" domain that has working email deliverability in both directions and maybe a web presence to go along with it. Businesses almost always have such "real" domains; but people registering for illicit purposes (spamming, ban evasion, etc) almost never do, instead only bothering to set up e.g. an SMTP forwarding proxy that has no ability to originate mail. (Often they get such a service as a value add from their domain registrar; though there are independent services for this as well.) To detect these, we check things like: - Is your domain a known temporary email provider? (Immediate fail) - Is your domain's MX record shared with one used by known temporary email providers? (Also an immediate fail; and zero false positives from this, surprisingly) - Does your domain have SPF and DKIM records? (Good) - Do your MX record hostname(s) resolve to the IP ranges of some skeezy VPS host, or to an IaaS's ephemeral-allocation IP ranges? (Bad) - Does your NS record, or your MX record's NS record, point to a domain registrar that's well-known to be used for discovering + acquiring short nonsense domain names in bulk? (Bad) - Does your domain have an apex A record? (Good) Is there a website there? (Good) Is that website a domain-parking page? (Very, very bad) - How recently does your WHOIS record say that your domain was last transferred/acquired? Last 14 days? (Somewhat bad, but not as bad as the other things) I would guess that if you're having problems, it's with one of these heuristics, or one in a similar vein. If you jump through all the same hoops a business would jump through to make your custom domain "real", then any heuristics SaaS companies come up with to differentiate business domains from spam domains, should work out in your favor. (My own custom domain — which truly is just a vanity domain — passes all these tests easily; mostly by just doing the default stuff Google Workspace recommended I do when I set it up. Because that's all businesses are doing, too.)
jjav 4y ago
> Account creation emails aren't arriving to my custom domain recently. What do you mean by custom domain? Anything not @gmail.com? How could that be, since every corporation everywhere has a custom domain. Must be something else going on.

snazz 4y ago

Huh—I wonder if that has to do with your TLD? I’ve been using custom domains for a few years and I have more issues with my .xyz domain than I do with my .com for both sending and receiving. Both have all the authentication DNS records set up.

lisper 4y ago
I run my own email server with a custom spam filter that I wrote and one of the things I've done is blacklist certain TLDs that are so spammy that just this one mitigation cuts my spam by >50%. XYZ is one of those super-spammy TLDs, sorry. Here is the complete list: 'top','tv','biz','rocks','ru','science','bid','date','casa','buzz','xyz','click','online'
- doodlesdev 4y ago
  I hate you and SpamAssassin. I also completely understand and will probably do the same when self hosting. Sad state of affairs.
- snazz 4y ago
  No apology needed :) That's why I use the .com for everything serious and I don't have issues sending or receiving with that one.

Semaphor 4y ago

I have zero issues with mail not arriving on my custom .me domain, and I’ve been using it for email for close to 10 years. Do you have an example of sites where account creation mails do not arrive?

tyingq 4y ago
That yours has existed for 10 years might be helping you, you established some trust/history before the big providers stopped caring about sink holing false positives.
- Semaphor 4y ago
  I have never heard of age being important for receiving mail. Sending, yes, as an annoying anti-spam measure, but why would anyone care about it the other way?

smeagull 4y ago

The second worst thing about email after spam, is all the solutions dedicated to fixing spam. I've had to setup DKIM, update records and keep up with changes to it just to keep my custom domain.

derefr 4y ago

> Some software companies seem to not send emails to custom domains. As someone who operates a SaaS that does auto-block some account registrations based on email address, I feel like I should speak to this. We're actually fine with custom domains — and I imagine this is true for most SaaS companies. All our business customers use custom domains; and we're not about to blow holes in our funnel by making it harder to acquire new business customers. There's no logic in our codebase that especially favors the big email providers; no whitelist with gmail/outlook/etc. on it. (And we haven't found that any of the lifecycle-mail sending services we've tried have had trouble with custom domains, either.) Instead, what we're mostly trying to stop is registrations using what you might call vanity or proxy domains — domains created by people who are only trying to obscure their real email address, but who aren't willing to invest the effort to make their domain into a "real" domain that has working email deliverability in both directions and maybe a web presence to go along with it. Businesses almost always have such "real" domains; but people registering for illicit purposes (spamming, ban evasion, etc) almost never do, instead only bothering to set up e.g. an SMTP forwarding proxy that has no ability to originate mail. (Often they get such a service as a value add from their domain registrar; though there are independent services for this as well.) To detect these, we check things like: - Is your domain a known temporary email provider? (Immediate fail) - Is your domain's MX record shared with one used by known temporary email providers? (Also an immediate fail; and zero false positives from this, surprisingly) - Does your domain have SPF and DKIM records? (Good) - Do your MX record hostname(s) resolve to the IP ranges of some skeezy VPS host, or to an IaaS's ephemeral-allocation IP ranges? (Bad) - Does your NS record, or your MX record's NS record, point to a domain registrar that's well-known to be used for discovering + acquiring short nonsense domain names in bulk? (Bad) - Does your domain have an apex A record? (Good) Is there a website there? (Good) Is that website a domain-parking page? (Very, very bad) - How recently does your WHOIS record say that your domain was last transferred/acquired? Last 14 days? (Somewhat bad, but not as bad as the other things) I would guess that if you're having problems, it's with one of these heuristics, or one in a similar vein. If you jump through all the same hoops a business would jump through to make your custom domain "real", then any heuristics SaaS companies come up with to differentiate business domains from spam domains, should work out in your favor. (My own custom domain — which truly is just a vanity domain — passes all these tests easily; mostly by just doing the default stuff Google Workspace recommended I do when I set it up. Because that's all businesses are doing, too.)

jjav 4y ago

> Account creation emails aren't arriving to my custom domain recently. What do you mean by custom domain? Anything not @gmail.com? How could that be, since every corporation everywhere has a custom domain. Must be something else going on.