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Comment by 2Gkashmiri | Hacker News Reader

2 things to ask.

1. why don't people selfhost email more? mailinabox is pretty painless to set up and would give you infinitely more security/privacy whatever you want. 2. why is email deliverability still an issue? why do you need to use third party email tools to ensure your email doesn;t go to spam? i am not concerned with newsletters/ads/ that sort of thing but a replacement to gmail/protonmail??

i have personally gone with miab like last year and beyond the first few weeks of gmail putting my emails into spam(then having to inform the other user to unspam it), things have been painless. i get to occasionally spin up the ssh to update the server but its fine. backblaze b2 backups ensure i am somewhat safe(er). can it be better? yes. is it ready to be used in production, aka a replacement to your regular paid/free email? you be the judge but i am sold on this idea

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> why is email deliverability still an issue?

Mostly what I've found as the main issue here is that popular blacklists will blacklist entire IP blocks instead of individual IPs, so you have to not only have a clean IP but also be on at least a /24 with all clean IPs. This can be hard to manage when relying on outside hosting. And unfortunately, trying to get around it by using a cheap/free relay like Amazon SES or SendGrid doesn't work, as they fail to keep their IPs clean (if they're even trying).

You replied question 2 with question 1: we don't self host email, -because- of deliverability issues.

why are they in the first place?

Spammers

Deliverability is an issue in both directions:

- when you send emails from MyWebsite.com, you want to make sure that Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, Proton Mail, etc users get your email.

- when you receive emails to your hi@mywebsite.com email, you don't want spam

V1 of email providers ostensibly solved this problem using lots of data as well as "supervised" machine learning (e.g. you telling the provider that a specific email is spam).

Self-hosting seems awesome if you're only handing out the email to a few people (probably a few hundred max?), you don't think it will be widely shared, and it's a slightly unique email that makes it hard for a script to guess (e.g. "hello@mywebsite.com" will be easily guessed but "john2@mywebsite.com" may not be)

- because google would prefer you use gmail so they can train their data models on you

- google would also prefer to have a monopoly on all email so that g-suite is necessary to reach your customers.

- because your IP address was at one point an e-mail spam server, but, that only really matters because of the above two reasons. Any nit, however irrelevant, will be used used to beat you into using gmail.

All anti-spam systems have non-zero false positive rate. It is hard to fix all FP in advance, but relatively easy to do this on case-by-case basis. When an FP affects some large sender it gets fixed. When it affects small senders - it is ignored because Big Corps don't care about small fish. They would be happy if all small mail servers will disappear and the market will be controlled by a few big companies.

You can self-host email all you want if you intend only to receive. If you want to be received, by O365/Gmail - that's another story.

It is technically possible to self-host email and send mail to O365/Gmail. They don't block 100% of small mail servers, only a fraction of them. But if you out of lack and their AI decided to block your IP, contacting their mail team is form very hard to impossible.

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