this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2025
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I tried maybe 15 years ago and it went about as well as you'd expect for back then. But I'm starting to get the itch again.

Have any of you tried relatively recently? How impossible is it to get reliable deliverability to gmail and whatnot these days?

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[–] IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz 4 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

It's quite likely that any given IP, unless you get one from shady VPS provider or something, is "clean". And if it's not it's usually not that big of a deal to get it cleared from major blacklists (spamhaus, google and microsoft covers quite a lot). You just need to dig up proper forms to tell them that you're a new owner of said IP and promise to play nice.

Same goes with domain names, but if you get a new one that's a non-issue. Just set up SPF-records properly (and preferably DKIM/DMARC, but those aren't strictly necessary and need a bit more than a single TXT-record) and you're good to go.

And then you of course need to stay away from those lists. If you configure your SMTP to act as a open proxy you'll be on every shitlist on the planet pretty quickly. So, reasonable measures against compromised account (passwords, firewalls, rate limits...) and against other threats (misconfigured/unsafe web service used for spam and stuff like that). Any of those alone are not too difficult to accomplish, but there's quite a few things you need to get right.

[–] perishthethought@piefed.social 1 points 14 hours ago

OK, thank you. I'm sure this is why people always say self hosting email is not for beginners.