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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

I know you specifically say you don’t want to try self-hosting outbound, but I’m going to still vote for it because I think the reasoning you cited is a little second-hand FUD. I self-host mail and yes, I occasionally run into annoying delivery problems, but not often, and once you’re configured (SPF, DKIM, and so on), E-mail is set-and-forget. I think the reassurance of not relying on the whims of yet another cloud provider outweighs the convenience, but definitely reasonable people can disagree! Good luck though. The cloud hosted solutions mentioned in other threads are fine choices.

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While I like personal mail servers and would suggest tech-savvy people at least to try them, OP mentions a home server, which probably involves a residential IP address, an ISP that won't set a reverse DNS for regular users, and likely other annoyances that would complicate mail delivery considerably more than usual.

If you'll decide to give it a try, BrandoElFollito, it's best to have at least one IPv4 address that isn't in a residential range and not in DNSBLs, a /64 IPv6 subnet (since blacklists tend to add at least a /64 subnet for those), ability to set in-addr.arpa records.

Self-hosting outbound is almost impossible though, I've yet to find an ISP that's not blocking outgoing port 25. I'm semi-self-hosting outbound and it's an absolute nightmare to get the ISP to acknowledge that if they block your packets, they must provide an alternative (smarthost). Also, getting them to register a reverse DNS entry is very difficult, most supporters couldn't tell you the difference between DNS and rDNS if their life depended on it.

The technical stuff with SPF and DKIM is the easy part.

I’m not sure how you can say it’s set and forget if you have to deal with “occasional annoying delivery problems”

Any service runs into "occasional delivery problems". In those cases you have to explain support the issue and deal with the luck if they will be understanding or not.

I'm sending few MM emails on daily basis (no, it's not spam) and hosting my email server on simple VM. Any service will cost me ten of thousands USD monthly while I am paying something under $100.

I am trying iRedMail to self host an email server. What do you use?

I've setup SPF, DKIM and DMARC. The PTR record is not possible for me to setup. How did you get around that? Did you get a static IP address?

What else do you think is necessary to make this better?

My stack is exim4, dovecot, and spamassassin, running on Debian stable. I do have a static IP address as the machine is a VPS. Admittedly this makes me reliant on my VPS provider so technically the whole stack isn’t in my control. I can however in theory fail over to metal on my residential IP if my VPS fails, although 1. I would want to request a static IP from my ISP and 2. I have not tested this transition recently.

At one point in the past I needed to get a different IP address and suddenly had deliverability problems because the IP I got from the VPS provider was previously naughty. Re-requesting another IP was all it took to solve that.

I would maybe start with a provider (considering that OP is hosting for others and not just themselves) and use that as fallback as they eventually start setting up their own outbound.

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