Tbh, out of all services I've seen people self-host, email is the most common one I've seen people describe as a bad idea™️.

I just chose a paid mail service (mailbox) and called it a day.

I stopped thinking of any email as “private” regardless of where it’s hosted, when I realized that everyone I email uses Gmail anyways; so all my emails end up going to Google anyways.

It made me an email nihilist

Self-hosting email is quite the undertaking... I don't have the energy to deal with it and just pay 10€/year for a hosting service.

Here's an informative (and funny) talk on why self-hosting email in its current state is probably a bad idea.

I work for state government and even we have trouble with email reputation issues from the big orgs. It's a pain for everyone.

If you want you can PM me your dkim and dmarc and SPF policy. Or just send me your url and I'll look it up. I used to fix these for a living. It's likely an issue with your SPF not being properly annotated.

I run my own mailserver in docker and it's not so hard! There was some difficulty at the start with mail going to spam, but after a little while "warming up" the IP with usage, it works fine. It's hardest to build an IP's reputation in the beginning because if your mail goes to spam, it doesn't typically lead to healthy conversations that can support it's history.

My trick was to forward all my incoming gmail messages from the account I was replacing into the new server - that way I could receive and reply from the new mailserver if people sent mail to the old one. Once it built up a bit of a history it started working fine, and that took maybe a few conversations over a couple of days.

The thing I have noticed is that you very quickly get destroyed by incoming spam - a more advanced filter is definitely on the list.

Me and a couple other people have ran into on the internet have thought that we need to invent "email 2", a clean slate implementation of email that serves it's asynchronous long form and attachment friendly function while leaving behind Decades of Cruft . We can make it into an encrypted by default and have conveniences that we never had before. It might even be an actual useful thing instead of just being the thing you sign up for accounts with to get to 2fa codes and spam from websites you buy stuff from

*fuck

I self-hosted my own email for a few years, everything was set up and reporting correctly, but Google just would never have it. I think the worst is it would be a bit inconsistent.

Anyway, I switched to an email provider with my own domain and it's much more reliable. That is until this week, I have noticed that some services are rejecting my domain. I think there is some whitelisting nonsense going on, but in those instances I just use an alias and that seems to work.

I just want to have control of my data!

Google Groups allows spammers to subscribe you to their groups in a workspace account, but doesn't allow you to unsubscribe since you're not part of that workspace account... Worse - all autoresponders for the spam will also be forwarded to all members of said group.

Since I do not participate in Google Groups, the nuclear option is to file all mails from Google Groups as spam with a Sieve script.

Note the require part may be too large as may sieve script also contains more rules than this one.

require ["body", "date", "editheader", "envelope", "fileinto", "imap4flags", "mailbox", "regex", "reject", "variables"];

if anyof(
    header :contains "List-Subscribe" "groups.google.com",
    header :matches "X-Google-Group-Id" "*"
   ) {
    if header :matches "Subject" "*" {
        set "subject" "${1}";
    } else {
        set "subject" "";
    }
    deleteheader "Subject";
    addheader :last "Subject" "[Google-Groups-Spam] ${subject}";

    fileinto "Junk";
}

Most email providers block new domains... You need to have the DNS records up for like 2 years before they start getting accepted... Or contact all the big doers to get yourself whitelisted

I have this problem for a while as well. Similar to you all mechanisms are implemented multiple sites say the configuration is correct, even headers in Gmail say DKIM and SPF passed. E-mail arrives everywhere except for gmail.

Thanks for posting, at least I know I'm not the only one.

@laurenceOfSuburbia
This ain't anything new. They have been doing this for decades and will still do it forever. Just move on with it, since it like trying to figure out something which has no meaning at all.
Just know for sure that every company has systems designed by some developer based on a whimsical mindset of someone at the very top. So, I can care less for these stupid companies and their useless management.

I also self host email and so far haven’t had any problems. Initial setup was annoying but it’s required zero effort this past few years, and I don’t think my emails land in spam folders. Maybe I can help?

Shoot me a message at test-message-lawrenceOfSuburbia@mspencer.net (which I’ll delete after it gets a message, for obvious reasons) and I’ll take a look. (I misspelled the name, I apologize, no insult intended)

Honestly I think I’ve received 10 spam messages in the last four years, and five have been from gmail addresses (Best Buy invoice spam) in the past two months. I submit each one to support.google.com/mail/contact/abuse and hopefully it helps.

Self hosting an email server to send mails that don’t get flagged as spam is a nightmare, I’d rather not attempt doing it again. My Lemmy instance is using SMTP2Go and the free tier is more than enough for my current sending capacity needs

i never had problems with Google, but Outlook always blocks my emails, just because it's not a standard .com .net etc domain...

They claim its for spam prevention which is why most ISPs actually also block outgoing SMTP port 25.

The dumb thing is, all it really does is push spammers onto using botted/stolen accounts which work way more effectively, and everyone else is forced to set up their email with Google or Microsoft.

If your domain isn't big enough to be recognized, all that SPF and DMARC won't mean crap to them.

I might be out of the loop on how email works, but doesn’t it hop between several other email servers on its way from Alice to Bob (and at least some of it must still be unencrypted)? If so and given google’s scale you could probably just assume that even if they’re not your inbox they’re going to be at least handling many if not most emails along the way.

Probably bad place to ask but.

Self hosting email is complicated only for sending mails or for receiving mail it's also hard?

Depending on what you want to do you might not need to actually send any mail.

Also, the anti-spam rules do also apply if you are answering a mail, I suppose it does as a response envelopement doesn't have any evidence that it's an actual response. But I have no experience self hosting email.

I put dog shit in my ass and Google knew five minutes before it happened, filmed it, and sold it back to me as a custom highlight of my home alone shenanigans. I find this a bit egregious, personally.

Running your own email server is also a good way to get a ton of headaches from your isp

I've started mine and it works fine. All the Google shit goes straight to the bin though.

IP rep?

Ngl, I can't blame most for flocking to Gmail. It's a lot more of a pain in the rear to self-host something like that, and it's just plain convenient.

It's the same reason a lot of the people leaving Gmail go to essentially the Privacy Google (Proton) as the replacement.

My email service provider just marks everything as spam. So they’re not alone, you say?

Irritating how much spam comes from Gmail/microsoft.

Do you send enough email to classify for Google to allow you to contest your status as spam? Because there is a minimum.

Google can still automatically mark your message as spam if enough people mark it as such or you trigger spam identification too often (this can happen if you send frequent test emails with not much in them) - it's not neccesarily an attack on you. But plenty of spammers will send perfectly well verified emails today, so you are just caught in the crossfire.

Try sending a gmail account you still have access to a couple of genuine looking mails (eg. At least a paragraph of legible text and with a signature), then marking the messages as not spam. That worked for me. Even after that though, one line messages can still trigger the spam detection.

Who cares? I'm not selling things, I have no idea where email goes on someone else's server, spam, straight to bin, whatever, recipient gets it and reads it or not. If they are so not interested in my message that they never read it, well, life goes on nothing was lost.

Honestly, it's way past time to phase out email