One domain has a small mailing list of about 200 users. The @yahoo.com addresses (and related, Yahoo-handled domains like old @att and @sbcglobal domains) are often just dropped.

Gmail addresses frequently go to spam, especially newly-added domains. I have found that having multiple @gmail users mark them as “not spam” tends to help, but not always.

My email server has had the same IP address for over 18 yrs, fwiw.

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.

Outlook/Hotmail is kind of stupid in this sense: if the first time, a new domain send an email they are very likely to flagged as spam. But if the user simply reply or send to that email, the moving forward hotmail won't flagged it. In other word, hotmail rely stringly

- is this domain new? - is this ip address start to send email new? - if I interact with this sender in the past

Seems thing with icloud and their proofpoint spam filtering.

gmail in other hand, has the best delivery rate, clear error message, great rate limiting and cool down period.

gmail is very smart, if we accidently send spam(due to our failure to filter out spam), gmail won't blocklist the whole IP, but hotmail/icloud does.

And the process to delist from them homail/icloud are just absurb. I'm unable to contact their team.

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[0] https://hanami.run

I'm starting a new company where email connection to my user base is essential. From time to time I also need to sen all users certain notifications which looks kinda like marketing email but isn't.

Could you contact me as I would like to ask your opinion on the configuration that I'm trying to set up. I would also like to discuss your experiences.

If isn't too much, you can reach me by email at jari@itsellesi.fi.

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.

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.

I'm guessing spammers may use Google Docs comments as a platform, but have never seen actual unsolicited Docs comments.

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).

I've had my main personal domain with them for a decade and never had a problem.

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.

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.

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.

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."

And when there's no follow-ups, you just assume your mail has been delivered? I recommend actually measuring your deliverability before making claims about it.

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.

Age may be a factor. I ran email for my domain on my own server for a long time too and generally had no delivery issues.

When I got another domain a few years ago and ran it on the same server it had a lot of 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.

My domain is a year older than Google itself and has been in continuous use for e-mail that whole time. The IP addresses it is on haven't changed in a decade. But that didn't matter. DKIM, SPF, DMARC, forward and reverse matching DNS, exactly four users who do not send spam under penalty of being buried under legal solicitations for green cards, and all the rest didn't help. Randomly getting sent to /dev/null for no good reason. And not enough traffic to qualify me to use their Postmaster utilities.

Three years ago I gave up and ported to Fastmail with a tear in my eye for the days when even the smallest net on the Internet could be a full participant.

The good news is that if you have postfix, using postscreen with an informed choice of blocklists is enough to deal with 99%+ of inbound spam. You can strap in rspamd or spamassassin/amavis behind that, but it's mostly not needed.

The inbound-mail-problems are largely solved, but surefire delivery to other parties is a matter of IPaddr/domain reputation, properly implementing relevant standards, and luck.

If you're interested in learning more about (including, but not limited to, self-hosting) email, the #email channel on the libera.chat IRC network is a great resource to ask questions.

I'll make a note on the UI elements. Honestly hadn't thought about the punycode usecase, good catch.

Second attempt, and I got a place to put the code. Then, while I was filling up the registration data, the page refreshed and started all over.

Third attempt finally worked...

Not the best on-boarding experience, but hey it really is cheap!

If you need more than three domains, try Migadu(not affiliated, just happy customer), they have no formal limits to their "micro" plan and is cheaper than FastMail. Migadu also allows adding alias domains(something I haven't seen anywhere), basically if you have a mailbox like "merlinscholz@domain.tld" you can attach some more domains as alias, like "@domain2.tld" "@domainx.tld" and those will all receive/send/operate as the same "merlinscholz@domain.tld". Neat feature I haven't found yet on other services.

12€/yr for 1GB + custom domain + 5 aliases (plus catchall).

The local maildir account is searchable like any other mailbox (I have about 10,000 messages going back to 2003). Syncthing[2] is configured to sync the maildir directory for backup and sync.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maildir

[2]https://syncthing.net/

Some of the libraries I wrote are open sourced and on my Github account, e.g. the web framework: https://github.com/ScottPeterJohnson/shade

In the long run I'm probably going to replace the Bayesian part of SpamAssassin with something custom, simply because operationally it's painful and I think neural nets are closer to state of the art.

Hard to say for sure. None of the servers really went above 15% average CPU and I don't think they maxed out net, and the health checker for HTTPS didn't have any problems. I'll doublecheck.

On the subject of migration, I'll make a note to add a FAQ for that, thanks.

2. Not at the moment- IPV6 support is a little dicier for mailservers because the scarcer IPV4 address is often used as a antispam signal.

boss@example.com is cooler for some than john.n.johnson.2@example.com, and they will pay.

Also, I generally don't stop the service for maintenance, unless I need to upgrade the database engine.

Generally phone access is third party through IMAP. On Android I personally use K-9 mail, but you can use anything that supports IMAP anywhere, which is a pretty good number of options for any platform.

(I use a paper diary, YMMV.)

You can still use Purelymail for mail, and have your mail client provide a cohesive mail/contacts/calendar UI.

I am usually the classic "engineer who neglects marketing" archetype. Maybe at some point I'll overcome that.

Same idea as: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash

Similar idea to cryptocurrencies.

Not such a big deal if you have your own domain (you should). Update the MX record and point it elsewhere.

I've switched from Gmail to a similar setup a year ago. Honestly, it's been way easier than I expected, in terms of updating everywhere. And I can just point my MX somewhere else should I ever be unhappy with the current provider.

No delivery issues either so far. Seriously, the hardest part about this whole ordeal was getting imapsync to run, to transfer my mails over.

Not using gmail or another big silo is really not that hard, as HN often makes it out to be.

I fondly recall many years ago I had some WebDAV issue and got a reply directly from you saying you'd fixed the issue but you were just heading out to dinner and so you'd push to production when you got back. That convinced a few friends to join too.

After about 10 years, Fastmail felt it was shifting to a more "enterprise" focus, which I can understand, and I just wanted to try something a little more "indie web".

[1] https://fastmail.blog/historical/changes-to-fastmail-service...

DMARC reporting could be a huge value add if you could build something in. That whole industry is a massive ripoff and too expensive for small businesses.

I think the expectation of urgency should be put into perspective alongside the $10/year price tag, i.e. if you need someone to get out of bed in the middle of the night $10 is probably not enough incentive.

That said, any issues or questions I've had have been resolved way faster than I experienced with Fastmail.

https://purelymail.com/advancedpricing

https://www.zoho.com/mail/zohomail-pricing.html

The biggest annoyance is that someone used mx, mx2, mx3 for their MX instead of mx1, mx2, mx3, so the dns record indentation doesn’t line up. Lmao.

(It's been three years since I tried it, and looking at my notes, I couldn't get Zoho to sync contacts for me, and somehow didn't get calendar notifications.)

Mail is the only critical thing most people run for themselves, really; and if the proverbial excrement hits the fan, mail is useful in fixing the fallout.

Sure, I would be able to acquire the skills to run a mail server, and I know how to monitor it all, and I know about what the moving parts are. But why go through all that hassle to save 10-40 dollars a year?

90% spam score comes from message, sending server isn't that relevant (if you base configuration is reasonable: PTR is right, server knows it's hostname and don't EHLO himself as localhost and so on). You can look at SpamAssassin default rulebase[1] for common rules.

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[1] - https://spamassassin.apache.org/old/tests_3_3_x.html

  whois $(dig +short A $(dig +short MX purelymail.com | head -n 1) | head -n 1)