"This is untrue" and yet I and others in this thread have been doing this for a long time without encountering the issue that you so confidently claim exists.

My email server is used by two people. Reputation is tracked by all the big providers, as evidenced by a) my email not being classified as spam, and b) them showing reputation of my domains in their various reputation dashboards.

"Those who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those that are doing it."

> "This is untrue" and yet I and others in this thread have been doing this for a long time without encountering the issue that you so confidently claim exists.

When you make a claim that supposedly applies to all people, a single counterpoint is sufficient to disprove the claim. It's as if you had said "all rabbits are black", then I showed you a white rabbit to counter that not all rabbits are black, and you come back with "look, I have a black rabbit here". How does that make sense to you?

> them showing reputation of my domains in their various reputation dashboards.

I never got access to their dashboards because my email volume was so low. If you somehow did, good for you.

> "Those who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those that are doing it."

I'm not "interrupting you from doing it". I'm interrupting you from giving bad advice to OTHER people.

> When you make a claim that supposedly applies to all people, a single counterpoint is sufficient to disprove the claim. It's as if you had said "all rabbits are black", then I showed you a white rabbit to counter that not all rabbits are black, and you come back with "look, I have a black rabbit here". How does that make sense to you?

Well said!

Your claim is "it is not possible to self-host your own mail on a low-volume server and not get consistently marked as spam by GMail / other large operators". The existence of a single person successfully doing exactly that (and there are numerous such people in this very thread) is sufficient to disprove your claim.

> Your claim is "it is not possible to self-host your own mail on a low-volume server and not get consistently marked as spam by GMail / other large operators". The existence of a single person successfully doing exactly that (and there are numerous such people in this very thread) is sufficient to disprove your claim.

Perhaps that was their claim - but I've generally read advice as: "There's no predictable way to guarantee that any given person can today take over hosting their own mail with predictable and good delivery to Gmail and o365."

So just that a, b and c have, so far, good delivery from their setup is not a guarantee that person x can just "set things up correctly" and somewhat straightforwardly get good delivery.

Last I did it, I had to go via undocumented api/pages for both o365 and Gmail in order to improve delivery - and mail that gmail/o365 smtp servers swore they accepted without problems - still sometimes ended up as spam, or simply vanished after delivery.

This was all individual low-volume. Never found any reason for it.

That said, I'll probably go back to hosting my own mail, and just live with certain parties being bad net citizens, eating the occasional mail without error or bounce. It's not like I really expect them to do better. Although especially in the case of Gmail, it's a little like Disney eating up public domain stories and spitting out copyrighted and trademarked content. Google did a lot to force people away from proper quoting (by hiding the fact of how Gmail quoted things in the "friendly" ui) and they pretty much killed Google groups - after marginalizing alternatives. But those ships have sailed.

You're correct, I shot myself in the foot there. But can we agree that some people manage to successfully run their own email servers and some people don't?

Oh, absolutely. I wouldn't recommend it casually to everyone, but if someone says "hey, I want to learn to host my own mail, but everyone tells me I shouldn't", I'm totally going to recommend they do it. If they have the desire to learn, it's likely (not certain! but likely) that they'll succeed.

I do think that most of the effort/risk is at the beginning. Making sure you're on a reputable provider, checking the history of your IP, setting your mail server & the security features up correctly, monitoring deliverability etc.

After everything is working well, if you got that part right, the ongoing effort should basically just be keeping software up-to-date. You could always get unlucky and e.g. someone starts sending spam on a nearby IP and you have to waste some time dealing with that, but hopefully if you picked your provider well that won't happen. It's yet to happen to me, but my provider only offers dedicated servers, which are probably not so popular with spammers.

> Making sure you're on a reputable provider

Oh, that tiny little detail where it has become impossible for almost anyone to actually send email from home, either because residential IPs are all marked as spam, or because your provider is giving you an incomplete internet connection that blocks outgoing SMTP.

> You could always get unlucky and e.g. someone starts sending spam on a nearby IP

Can someone tell me why providers ever thought it was a good idea to block entire IP ranges?

> Oh, that tiny little detail where it has become impossible for almost anyone to actually send email from home, either because residential IPs are all marked as spam, or because your provider is giving you an incomplete internet connection that blocks outgoing SMTP.

Well, by "provider" I was referring to the hosting provider. I wouldn't typically recommend hosting from home [0]. Apart from the issues you identified, over the course of 20 years I've moved house multiple times so would have had email downtime and likely had to change IP address, likely leading to reputation starting again from zero (at best) or picking up an IP with bad history (much worse).

> Can someone tell me why providers ever thought it was a good idea to block entire IP ranges?

If you repeatedly receive spam from multiple IPs within a given ASN, and the abuse contact is non-functional or doesn't actually resolve the problem, it is fairly reasonable to consider that the ASN is friendly to spammers. Blocking by prefix rather than entire ASN is a bit less of a sledgehammer, but follows the same logic.

[0] If you own your house, have no plans to move any time soon, and can get a connection from a provider who is willing to give you a stable static IP that isn't categorised as 'residential/dynamic' by the major lists, hosting from home should be fine. But that's quite a few 'if's.

Their requirement for it applying to all people make it generally universally true. If you have a dedicated IP with reverse DNS pointing to an A record on the primary domain that server is responsible for, and you have SPF, TLS and DKIM running smoothly, it’s very unlikely any spam markers are due to the fact that you’re sending mail from <regular Ip> instead of <Microsoft 365>. This doesn’t mean you’ll never be in the spam folder, it means your spam reputation is based on the content and frequency of your emails.

Not an expert on this, but maybe this is because you have been hosting your server for 20 years? Maybe newer servers have a higher threshold to cross? Seems a logical hypothesis to me, which would mean you're both right.

I selfhosted my email server on the same IP address for 10 years and never got my reputation tracked. I remember once reading that they needed something in the range of a few thousand emails going to their servers. I swear it used to be listed on the google dashboard but like everything else email related they hide this information to "protect from spammers". Sounds like an excuse for anti-compeditive behaviour to me

> being a low-volume sender means your email will be constantly classified as spam

"will" is a strong word. I've read that very low volume sending server can sometimes have issues, but never experienced it. My outgoing volume is about as low as it gets since it's just me and some family that don't use it much, but don't experience any problems.

Have you measured your deliverability?

I have a low volume mail server and don't have any problem with this.

Is this a feeling or did you actually measure your deliverability?