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I've looked into this extensively and there are essentially four options: 1. Self-host on a reputable VPS provider. Deliverability is usually not a problem if
by bityard 3y ago
I've looked into this extensively and there are essentially four options:
1. Self-host on a reputable VPS provider. Deliverability is usually not a problem if your provider actually takes action against spammers on their network. They tend to work pretty hard to keep up the reputation of their IP space. I have self-hosted my own email for well over a decade on providers like these with no serious issues. It's not generally too hard to test the reputation of an IP/domain before putting it into production.
2. You can use a dedicated SMTP relay service, but these are usually quite expensive and their customers tend to be bulk email senders for blasting out marketing wank. You probably don't want your domain to be associated with these anyway.
3. Another option is to buy a full-fledged email account from any of the common providers and just use their SMTP servers. (Make sure to set your SPF records appropriately.) Not expensive but typically far from free. And it seems silly to self-host your mail if you're literally paying a company to provide the same service...
4. This is less "self-hosted" but the cheapest and most reliable way to get your email out is to sign up for a cloud account at any of the major providers and just use their SMTP relays. Most will allow you to send from outside their network, after proper authentication is set up. Unless your monthly email volume is north of 4 figures, it will likely be free or cost pennies per month.
Don't forget that amongst email providers reputation is a thing, and if you go out and purchase a domain, it may be some time before you can actually use it. Lots of providers specifically penalize domains younger than X months old, they will "graylist" IPs that haven't talked to them before, and a few will flat-out blacklist entire gTLDs known to be heavily used by spammers.
- aidenn0 3y ago> and a few will flat-out blacklist entire gTLDs known to be heavily used by spammers. This explains poor delivery for emails from a .xyz domain I have, even hosted with an e-mail provider.
- mindslight 3y agoAlso, email reputation and deliverability only applies to sending email. While many of the advantages of self hosting only require receiving email - eg better control over your root of trust for account auth, different address per account to avoid your email address being used as a join key for cross-company surveillance, etc. Self hosting doesn't need to be an "all or nothing" affair. Set up your domain with whatever server setup you think you'd like and start switching account identities over to that. Then only after you've gotten comfortable running it and tested deliverability, start switching over your personal correspondence.
- gmzamz 3y agoUtilizing fancy gTLDs can still prevent you from receiving mail. Not due to a decision to explicitly block it but because it doesn’t match whatever regular expression they use to validate. Notably, .email fails consistently due to it being >3 characters. I tried to convert to using first@last.email and there is a significant minority of sites that didn’t allow it.
- mindslight 3y agoGood point! That's still kind of orthogonal to deliverability though. In fact in line with my point, you're better off finding this out before you start transferring personal correspondence to that domain. The only similar problem I've experienced is sometimes companies will get uppity if you put their company name in the email address you give them. But it's easy enough to just make up a difference nonce for those cases (or start your scheme based on opaque nonces for everyone). I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop and surveillance companies to start discriminating against non-surveillance-company email addresses the way they do against VOIP phone numbers.
- vel0city 3y agoI've been using gTLDs for an email for several years now (about the time gTLDs came out). It was really rough going for a while but these last couple of years it's been rare for me to have an issue.
- EvanAnderson 3y ago> 2. You can use a dedicated SMTP relay service, but these are usually quite expensive ... I don't typically give endorsements, but I've been using DuoCircle.com since back when they were part of "dyn.com" and I've been very pleased. Apparently they have a free tier, but their current pricing is very reasonable to my eye. (I'm on an old annual plan that doesn't appear to be offered anymore...) https://www.duocircle.com/email/outbound-smtp https://www.duocircle.com/email/outbound-smtp Deliverability through them has been very good over the years.
- tomatocracy 3y agoI've been doing a combination of 1 (good reputation IP) and 4 (using AWS in my case). I switched VPS provider a couple of years ago - before that I had deliverability issues to anyone using MS 365 (despite jumping through Microsoft's various hoops etc) - since then everything has been fine. I also have my outbound SMTP server set to send via AWS if my email includes a particular custom header (which it also then strips out before forwarding on) - which means for domains I think might have deliverability issues I can deal with this without needing to make a huge effort.