People who have been hosting their own email for decades like GP probably built up a solid reputation for their domain and IP before spam filtering became such a kafkaesque business and IPv4 blocks became so fragmented.
If you start self-hosting now, you should be prepared to lose quite a few emails randomly for the first X months while everyone else tries to figure out whether you're legit or not. Though I would encourage anyone who can to try to self-host at least some part of their email infrastructure, even if just for the learning experience, I would also recommend that they avoid using self-hosted email for anything business-critical until they're sure they've got the hang of it.
Tip: Start with a solid SPF, DKIM, DMARC policy and register for microsoft, yahoo, etc.’s admin tools and add your domain to google’s webmaster and postmaster tools. (Yes, even if Google postmaster won’t show you anything yet)
Use mail-tester.com or similar tools to ensure everything is configured correctly.
And then just start sending. As long as your volume grows slowly over the first few months, you’ll get basically no rejects.
Yep, it takes patience and lots of trial and error to build and maintain a reliable email server, unlike an HTTP server or Minecraft server which you can fire up with a script any time you want. Probably explains why so few people do it successfully.
I know about the Google postmaster tools but I'm coming up blank finding anything about Microsoft and Yahoo. Do you (or anyone else) have links to these?
> you should be prepared to lose quite a few emails randomly for the first X months while everyone else tries to figure out whether you're legit or not
And then prepared to lose quite a few emails consistently for the next 10 years when some decide you're not legit.
I'll definitely take that (which is largely under my control) over e.g. Google deciding that I've done something wrong one day and cutting off my email.
I agree with your sentiment, but It's not under your control. It's under the registrar's control. I'd argue registrars are way more prone to social engineering attacks than google is. I also don't use Google as my email provider though.
The choice of registrar is under my control, though.
Also, little-known fact: if you register a UK company (probably more practical if you already have one, but the effort is not actually that big), you can register .uk domains directly with Nominet, the UK registry, by setting yourself up as a self-managed registrar. It doesn't cost anything (beyond the cost of the domain name) and is very easy. I'd love to know if there are any other registries that allow something similar.
If you start self-hosting now, you should be prepared to lose quite a few emails randomly for the first X months while everyone else tries to figure out whether you're legit or not. Though I would encourage anyone who can to try to self-host at least some part of their email infrastructure, even if just for the learning experience, I would also recommend that they avoid using self-hosted email for anything business-critical until they're sure they've got the hang of it.