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Comment by gigel82 | Hacker News Reader

But how do you get a "clean IP" to actually run it on? My ISP's IP changes every so often (whenever there's a power outage for example).

Last I checked, you can't run mail servers on typical cloud providers (like Azure, Oracle) and cheap VPSs are almost guaranteed to have "dirty IPs" (used for spam and thus blacklisted).

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I also expected lowend VPS servers to have tainted IPs but surprisingly they are mostly clean. Currently I run Mox on very cheap $0.6/month (multi year contract) VPS and for the almost half year that I monitor the IP address there was 0 blocklist appearances, mail delivers geneally fine (only had to fish it out of outlook spam at my work address). Most other of my monitored VPS IPs are also completely clean. It seems spammers are not tolerated by those providers.

I have not tried this, but I'm reminded of the post https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2024/09/22/colo/, which describes how one can host your own infrastructure in a colocation rack, which sounds pretty rad.

I thought it was going to be a problem when I gave up the IP I've had for a mailserver at hoster A for 15 years and moved to Hetzner, but it wasn't. But of course that's only anecdata, like everything 90% of personal mail server operators will tell you, no one runs several different setups at different IPs/hosters.

I have used them[1] in the past with good results.

* No affiliation

[1] https://www.pubconcierge.com/email-marketing

Hetzner served me just well for this purpose for 2 decades now.

Some ISPs can provide you a static IP either for free or by paying a premium.

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