I'd rather kill myself than host SMTP again | Hacker News Reader

I'd rather kill myself than host SMTP again

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30 pointsthunderbong13 comments

Around 2007, we had a site that was emailing ~500k/mo newsletters out for a half dozen clients. I could not convince my bosses that it had value and was worth investing in. It was merely an ancillary service to them, not worth promoting or monetizing.

my bosses were pissed I wouldn't let them mass mail to all users without the clients permission. (these were the clients' lists). That didn't help.

When the business broke, they didn't bother renewing the domain.

Couple years later one of them asked me, informally, if I knew of a better email service than the one they were using now; it was charging them "postal rates"... "Can't help ya, so sorry."

For profit situations cause for profit problems. This should probably be re-titled, "I'd rather kill myself than be a mass commercial emailer again". Hosting your own SMTP is not a problem. Sending out tens of thousands of emails... yeah, that'll be a problem.

Actually, hosting a personal/small business SMTP server is made more diffficult by the year.

One of the biggest issues caused by the big 3 is unpublished blacklists. M$ and Goggle especially will send email from smail servers to JUNK (or something equivalent) or in the case of M$, accept the mail and then simply not deliver it to the end user at all.

Overcoming this issue is tedious and uncertain, and for some never accomplished.

I think a true general statement is that increased oligopoly in email service is detrimental to personal/small business email providers, and primarily benefitial to the major service providers.

I don't disagree. I've been doing it since 2013. I had to call MS support with a little social engineering to get off the o365 blacklist back in ~2015. I just think op's post framing their mass emailing problems as a problem for all mail hosting should be noted as invalid.

I've self-hosted email for decades, but when I had to migrate recently to a big VPS provider, I started having issues sending to most Outlook customers. (I actually expected more problems, although delivery to GMail seems to work great.) Does anyone here have recommendations for smart hosts supporting outgoing SMTP for very low volume (personal) use?

You could use Amazon SES for your outgoing requirements

You have to ask permission and get an exemption, but if you have an established domain sending mail for personal use, I've gotten self hosted mail working on Vultr and Scaleway.

I host my own email too. This is what helped me resolve issues with Outlook -

https://discourse.mailinabox.email/t/how-to-unblock-from-mic...

They wrote their own SMTP software, which might increase the likelihood of running into such issues.

It’s always sad to read such reports. I’m glad to have never run into any significant issues with my own mail server for personal use.

they admit to running a "warm up" service that effectively spams google. yes, there is an argument to be made that it isn't spam because the holder of the google account is intending for the message to be delivered to them, but from google's perspective it is most certainly spam.

I gave up the SMTP hosting dream earlier this year after like 10 years of it never quite working out as well as I hoped. My friends had email addresses on their custom domains hosted on my server, I was essentially their one-stop-shop for web hosting until it became just too much. Web hosting was easier, but email hosting was always the problem. Unless you're an expert in email, and it's all you do and it's your passion in life, it's just not worth hosting it yourself.

SpamHaus is paid off by the spammers. They only blacklist honest email providers.

They are right about UCEPROTECT, what a scam they run, but Spamhaus should do better.

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