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Comment by eloeffler | Hacker News Reader

I've been running a mail server for about 8 years now for me privately. I use it only for ordering stuff and for communicating with vendors but it works very well. Large e-mail providers never block me as far as I can tell, small ones i don't know. But I never get the feeling that my mails don't arrive in time.

I've also run servers with applications that send out automatic mails and there, problems were bigger. I think this is because there are a lot of mechanisms such as SPF that miss when an application simply uses sendmail. I've followed the archwiki instructions [1] mostly, a couple of years ago, and it works very reliably.

This won't help protonmail with abusing users but for a private server, it works well. I think a server also builds reputation over time.

But honestly I don't understand why it works entirely. However, I wanted to say that private mailservers are not doomed :)

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Mail_server

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Same here. Had my own mail server for 20+ years. Occasionally tweak it when things change, e.g. SPF being enforced or DMARC.

Registered in most postmaster tools, but at my rate of sending, this is only to have a chance of being herd if problems arise.

There were a few blockages over the years, the last ones came from Microsoft: once in a while they refuse to use A records if MX is not present, or just swallow your mails.

For the important mails to first-time recipients I ask to RSVP, which works out beautifully. People know that email can be unrealiable.

I gave up on my domain registered back when an ISDN 64k channel was a viable internet connection, partly because the amount of inbound email spam was absurd. The spammers ruined email long before Gmail was a thing.

I see a dozen spam emails per day at most, there are weeks when I do not see spam at all. This is not a big price to pay for independence. The rest is caught by spamassassin. I retrained it several years ago last time.

Sometimes I miss being part of a larger network of email providers that share spam signatures, but not enough to start searching.

> a dozen spam emails per day

Jesus Lord. I don't receive that much email in a week, legitimate plus spam combined.

I get what you're saying about independence, but using your own domain and pointing MX to any decent email service gets you 90% there with way less pain IMHO.

How much of that difference is because your external email provider is silently swallowing the most egregious spam such that you don’t even realise they’ve done so? I suspect the folks who run their own are monitoring all the email with none being missed from their stats.

This. Most inbox providers filter a lot of mail -- spam as well as occasional legitimate email -- without the recipients ever finding out.

That sucks. All I can say us that I run spamassassin and never lose mails. I receive some marketing on my info@ and webmaster@ aliases, mostly for SEO. But fortunately there isn't much coming in. I use custom aliases for registrations and such so I can notify the source in case my associated mail address with them is being spammed. But that rarely happens. I've never had to block an address, spam always stopped coming in after 2-3 mails when it leaked from somewhere.

It's probably good not to have html / load external media enabled. Makes the address seem inactive because tracking mechanisms won't work (e.g. tracking pixels [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_beacon

Using mutt to read mail definitely helps.

One vital thing is to not put your email address in clear-text online, especially heavily indexed sites.

The moment I had a real email address end up in the AUTHORS file of nodejs, that address is now a spamhole. Domain is otherwise fine.

Another can be buying a new domain that (perhaps purely coincidentally) that has already made the rounds into spammers dbs.

That's a good way to make sure only spammers can contact you. I don't conceal my email address and I get at least a thousand spam emails per day. If it lets one good stranger contact me per day then it's worth it. Being a Gmail early adopter, I also get so many emails due to typos or incorrectly filled out forms where people are trying to contact someone with a similar name. It's interesting to learn about what people who share my last name are doing.

Oh for sure but although I got a fair amount my domain owner email address was just swimming in it. As others have said thousands of emails a day.

Oh yeah, these days I hope it’s common practice to use separate email addresses for separate prurposes for individuals too.

So yeah, domain owner is a tough one but shouldn’t really receive legitimate inbound contacts as long as you have some other contact method on the/a associated website. Personally I just black hole that one.

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