I strongly recommend everyone to look into hosting your own mail server. DigitalOcean will rent you a Linux VM for $5 a month or something crazy like that. You can figure out how to install postfix/dovecot/squirrelmail it in a few hours.
If nothing else, it keeps critical functionality decentralized, and you learn something and $5 a month for career insurance is pretty damn cheap.
Its not the mail server, its deliverability. If you can set up a $5/month server to send email so can every spammer ever and the big mail providers know this.
Mail sent like this won't be delivered anywhere with even the most basic spam filtering which includes blacklists of known spam-source IP address blocks like Digital Ocean/AWS/Heroku.
I have a personal mail server that collects my mail, but use my "default" Comcast MX to send. I'm sure metric craptons of email flow through that, but a lot of ham does too, so I've never been blacklisted.
I'd suggest that rather than the goal being to instantly leave this service or that the instant that they offend you, that you envision your policy as one of being ready to leave if you ever need to. The biggest key to that is having your own domain name and using that as your email address. Right now having your own domain is the biggest superpower you can have on the net, even with the events of last week. Honestly, pretty much everyone reading this from the US ought to own a domain name and be using it at least for their email address, even if it's purely delegated to gmail for the time being. They're too cheap to pass up the flexibility they offer.
What prevents your domain name registrar from shutting you down arbitrarily?
Also, I'm not sure what you're referring to as Comcast MX, but if you mean a Comcast provided server, that's a huge privacy hole. If you mean your own server on a Comcast line, then your IP is leaked to everyone you email, which is also a privacy hole since it ties your IP directly to your identity.
"What prevents your domain name registrar from shutting you down arbitrarily?"
I did say "even with the events of last week". It's the biggest stick you can get right now. It doesn't make you invincible.
"If you mean your own server on a Comcast line, then your IP is leaked to everyone you email, which is also a privacy hole since it ties your IP directly to your identity."
I don't email out much. Everyone I email is pretty much already going to know I'm me. Comcast already has arbitrarily large amounts of surveillance they can perform on me, sitting here worrying about my "outbound email hole" is a waste of time.
Great advice! Exactly what I'm doing as we speak after reading this. I'm such a cheerleader for Google but after hearing about this a few times its starting to scare the crap out of me. F that. Not a good idea to let a multi-national entity control my access to EVERYTHING with zero customer service options.
I did this. If you comply with some basic stuff like DKIM and ptr you get 100% accepted on everything but hotmail. I don't know how to get hotmail/outlook to stop greylisting me consistently.
Er, no, it seems anti-spam. The fact of the matter is, plenty of people use dime-a-dozen hosting to make spam bots. These days, you're better off using a reputable mail service as opposed to rolling your own, unless you have a fairly large company.
It is anti-spam, but it is also anticompetitive to block anyone that isn't gmail or an already known big player in that space. Apparently lots of people are having trouble setting up a mail server on their own without getting blocked by Google. Can you see that as a problem for the intent at large? I wonder what kinda marketshare gmail has.
It's probably a problem they aren't in a hurry to solve either.
I mean it's not that you're automatically blocked it's just that your server's score for sending email is nonexistent which means a high likelihood of being a spam server.
You have to spend a long time to build up a reputation to get places to mark your email as not spam. This is why many providers that allow you to do bulk email through them have multiple IPs and they only let the most behaved on their better reputation IPs.
It's probably a problem they aren't in a hurry to solve because there's no reason to solve it. Any decently-funded small business can afford to use proper web hosting (Er, I love Digital Ocean. But they aren't really "web hosting").
Google (and basically every other reputable email host _and_ every "independent" email host) are blocking mail from services that host cheap compute power. A lot of Azure and GCP email traffic would likely be blocked, not just Digital Ocean.
If you want to start an email service, use something that isn't a known platform for spammers.
If someone doesn't want to handle his own email server, a simpler alternative is to buy email services for a domain you own; it will be easier to change provider if needed since, unlike a @gmail.com address, you won't need to change any address.
Edit: of course you will need to download and keep the emails by yourself if you don't want to lose access to them, but that's much easier than handling a whole server.
Do you find you have problems delivering to other mail servers?
That has always been the trick. Running the mail server is easy. Having your email show up in other servers is "hard". Right now, with so many users using GMAIL, using gmail is a huge boon to not being marked spam (Google is way less likely to market a @gmail.com email as spam compared to say a @aol.com email).
I haven't had any issues but I've been hosting my own mail server since 2000 or so. I've been blacklisted by spamhaus? before years ago but I submitted a request to remove and they did. Google has a page to help with this though.
Also, I personally host at home and have Comcast business internet. I have a 5 IP block of which one is a mail server. I have occasional internet outages and more frequent power outages, but it's been fine.
I'd like to add another voice to this: I host my own email myself out of my house, and I've never really had any problems with it either. AFAIK I've never been marked as spam, even after I've sent a couple of mis-configured emails that should have probably been marked as spam.
Your IP is leaked to everyone you email (and if you receive mail, to everyone who emails you), which is a privacy hole since it ties your IP directly to your identity. I assume you don't mind, or did you not realize this?
The whois shows my company name. I mean since I run a company, I don't really want that private. Also, those IPs are accessible through a simple DNS lookup of the sender domain, so I'm not really losing any security.
The whois wasn't my concern though (since I already knew it was solvable); my concern was the IP address leakage, which gives away your location among other things...
I run our own mail server at the office for our domain and I don't have any deliverability issues, but I made sure to have the full suite of DMARC, SPF, etc. all set up and kept current on the RBLs. Also it's very low volume, which I think is the key.
I've been using my own kimsufi server for years, and live in Montréal so the latency to their Canadian location is superb. The low end servers are often sold out, but become available every couple months. I went for one with a spinning disk for the extra storage. The server's dedicated so performance is much better than a storage VPS where people share a spinning drive.
However I still end up forwarding everything to to my gmail account and using it as en e-mail client because it makes e-mailing searching and filtering so fast and easy. Outgoing mail sent through my own SMTP server and typically gets through, so I could set up dovecot later.
How good are open source spam filtering tools? Besides not having to maintain my own infrastructure, spam filtering is probably the biggest value add for Gmail, or so it was when I got my account 10 years ago.
They used to be remarkably good. Shortly after PG wrote his A Plan for Spam essay, I set up a customized system that used my own spam e-mails as training data. I can't remember the tool I used, but it involved a script on top of maildir which is sure to be far more kludgy than what you could do now. The technique is powerful enough I suspect it still works remarkably well today because it's tuned to your own corpus of spam messages. Nonetheless, for the last decade I've been too lazy to do this and just forward everything to gmail, though gmail does give me a few false positives every couple years.
That's a very cool idea, but the spam filtering of gmail can hardly be matched. On the plus side, now you could send emails with much larger attachments.
No, but the odds of my email account going away (while catastrophic) seem pretty unlikely, and not having to sift through spam every single day is a pretty nice perk. Basically strong spam filtering support is a requirement for any tool I use, and I'm happy to hop off of Gmail if another tool delivers comparable value.
I do get that. And perhaps you're discreet enough online that your Google account will never attract scrutiny. But it's something that every Google user ought to keep in mind, I think. I'm guessing that Salil Mehta never even considered it.
Fair point, but I don't understand why people think this is a case of Salil offending Google's censors and not simply algorithms gone awry. I got downvoted for expressing this doubt elsewhere in this thread, but no one could answer. I just can't parse a motive for Google to censor him on (as far as I know, he didn't criticize Google's diversity policies or anything of the sort).
If nothing else, it keeps critical functionality decentralized, and you learn something and $5 a month for career insurance is pretty damn cheap.