this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2026
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DKIM, DMARC, SPF, rDNS/PTR, EHLO... all correct and verified in the email "original source," BY GOOGLE. Still goes to SPAM folder because **** you, apparently. I hate Google.

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[–] halezinflames@lemmus.org 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Ngl, I can't blame most for flocking to Gmail. It's a lot more of a pain in the rear to self-host something like that, and it's just plain convenient.

It's the same reason a lot of the people leaving Gmail go to essentially the Privacy Google (Proton) as the replacement.

[–] Prontomomo@lemmy.world 63 points 2 days ago (2 children)

I stopped thinking of any email as “private” regardless of where it’s hosted, when I realized that everyone I email uses Gmail anyways; so all my emails end up going to Google anyways.

It made me an email nihilist

[–] laurenceOfSuburbia@lemmy.world 35 points 2 days ago

I hate it. it was supposed to be open standard

[–] GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 9 points 2 days ago

Microsoft Exchange and the web-based Outlook probably still has a plurality of email volume, because of their dominance in enterprise. Even on the web based consumer space, Apple and Yahoo still have significant market share.

I put dog shit in my ass and Google knew five minutes before it happened, filmed it, and sold it back to me as a custom highlight of my home alone shenanigans. I find this a bit egregious, personally.

[–] drbluefall@toast.ooo 184 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (12 children)

Tbh, out of all services I've seen people self-host, email is the most common one I've seen people describe as a bad idea™️.

I just chose a paid mail service (mailbox) and called it a day.

[–] surewhynotlem@lemmy.world 90 points 2 days ago

Same. It's great for a technical challenge. Don't do it for your primary email unless you're ok losing emails and having them rejected a lot.

[–] takeda@lemmy.dbzer0.com 21 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I've been hosting my e-mail for over 2 decades now, e-mail goes everywhere but gmail (despite working with them for years). They are doing it exactly so people stop doing it.

[–] galoisghost@aussie.zone 48 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Yeah we should just let them win. Why fight? It’s not like most of the spam and phishing come from Gmail and hotmail accounts. It’s those fucking self hosters

[–] toxicmode@lemmy.dbzer0.com 38 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (3 children)

How's your self hosted email going? Any advice you can share to avoid some of the major issues?

[–] Lee@retrolemmy.com 33 points 2 days ago (7 children)

I've run a mail server since the late 90s. I gave up running my own outbound years ago. Whether it gets received is too inconsistent. Primarily, make sure the IP you use isn't on any spam lists. If it is, get a new IP or try to submit appeals. Make sure you have the standard anti spam/authenticity measures implemented (they're listed in the OP).

These are the minimum. Years ago it was enough to have reasonable delivery. Unfortunately these aren't that helpful anymore because spammers also set them up (often with seemingly randomly generated domain names). I assume because not having them was a fairly strong signal for being a spammer, so now they also set them up, which also means there's not really any configuration / setup you can do to seem legitimate (aside from mail volume and the content itself which will be analyzed).

Anyway running your own SMTP itself is easy. The problem is getting your mail to the inbox or at least spam/junk folder (your mail may get blackholed and not even show up in spam). At least when you get a rejection, you know something is wrong, but many times the receiving server will indicate a success code and simply not deliver it to the user (not even to their spam).

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[–] WesternInfidels@feddit.online 21 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Maybe the way to fight GMail's outsized power is to stop using GMail. You can do that without going all the way to self-hosting.

[–] daveyOsborn@infosec.pub 2 points 1 day ago

Maybe the way to fight GMail’s outsized power is to stop using GMail.

Stopping your own gmail use is trivially easy. It just scratches the surface. In order to not lick Google’s boots, you also need to stop sending email to gmail users. That means doing an MX lookup before emailing to see if their vanity email address is on a Gmail host. And of course this also means not sharing an email address with gmail users.

I do that, in fact. I also boycott Microsoft. In the end, this means I am not using email much at all.

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[–] realitista@lemmus.org 19 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (5 children)

Even using a reputable hosting provider and personal domain will get you spam black holed these days

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[–] fluffykittycat@slrpnk.net 21 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Me and a couple other people have ran into on the internet have thought that we need to invent "email 2", a clean slate implementation of email that serves it's asynchronous long form and attachment friendly function while leaving behind Decades of Cruft . We can make it into an encrypted by default and have conveniences that we never had before. It might even be an actual useful thing instead of just being the thing you sign up for accounts with to get to 2fa codes and spam from websites you buy stuff from

[–] jj4211@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Frankly, I'm rather shocked it hasn't happened by now.

We've tried to bandaid over it with various weird things, but fundamentally SMTP is just weird.

I could easily imagine a domain having some SRV record to advertise "hey, I support NeoSMTP", and peers switching to that instead, possibly pinning on successful NeoSMTP negotiation.

Get rid of a lot of the relaying which has not been useful in modern times and only a liability, and perhaps offer an https option to be less likely to be blocked (a TXT record to indicate url, and a node could declare their NeoSMTP entry point as https://mail.server/NeoSMTP/ or whatever works for them).

[–] ricecake@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Oh, there have been plenty. The issue though is the classic "make a better standard, and now you have N+1 standards".
Everything is wrong with SMTP. It's still in use because it's supported everywhere. Anything that wants to replace it either needs to entirely replace it in one fell swoop, or it needs to be backwards compatible.

The result is that occasionally a new thing comes up, a handful of people try it but there isn't critical mass to make other features really useful so it fades.

[–] fluffykittycat@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It's fine if Legacy email Remains the thing that could spend whereas email 2 can be used for actual correspondence between people

[–] ricecake@sh.itjust.works 1 points 18 hours ago

You'll have to walk me through what you mean by that. I'm not sure how what I'm hearing you say would improve anything.

[–] jj4211@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Hence my references to DNS records in addition to MX to determine if an endpoint is SMTP only or better. For compatible interop.

[–] ricecake@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago

But that's the thing: now you haven't made an email replacement, you've made email more complicated.

If you're backwards compatible you need a very compelling feature to get people to switch, and using the feature is limited until people switch.
That's how we added spf, dkim, dmarc and starttls.
The biggest difficulty is managing the layers of compatibility.

[–] motruck@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] jj4211@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

Looks like replacing IMAP rather than SMTP, which is significantly less thorny.

[–] MonkeMischief@lemmy.today 10 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Love this idea!

I feel like Arcane/Delta Chat is a step toward this. It somehow uses an email protocol and it works just like Signal or any other message app! I dunno how the heck it works but it's super cool.

That's something I want too: An open standard my friends and family can be on, where "the market" isn't.

Edit: I see, it seems the issue in the main thread is:

  • Gmail blocks custom servers as spam 99% of the time.
  • 99% of normieverse uses Gmail. :(

But getting people on other email providers to talk to each other... shouldn't be an issue then?

[–] MrKiosc@reddthat.com 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

"normieverse" hit me like a brick

[–] MonkeMischief@lemmy.today 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

LOL I honestly can't tell if that's good or bad, in this context. XD

[–] ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Running your own email server is also a good way to get a ton of headaches from your isp

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[–] Forester@pawb.social 28 points 2 days ago (3 children)

If you want you can PM me your dkim and dmarc and SPF policy. Or just send me your url and I'll look it up. I used to fix these for a living. It's likely an issue with your SPF not being properly annotated.

[–] JigglySackles@lemmy.world 10 points 2 days ago

That's cool of you to offer that to them.

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[–] OR3X@lemmy.world 46 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I work for state government and even we have trouble with email reputation issues from the big orgs. It's a pain for everyone.

[–] takeda@lemmy.dbzer0.com 18 points 2 days ago

This is done on purpose, to make people to switch to their e-mail or use them for hosting.

Google did the same thing with XMPP (they were welcomed when they joined, then they made it so XMPP users couldn't message GTalk/Hangouts users, but the other way worked), they tried similar thing with Usenet, but they never get dominance there so they let their services to be major source of spam on Usenet until they were blocked, ultimately removing Usenet indexing from Google).

I would really encourage to contact our local reps (both federal as well as state) and encourage them to introduce legislation that would punish this practice.

[–] lena@gregtech.eu 46 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Self-hosting email is quite the undertaking... I don't have the energy to deal with it and just pay 10€/year for a hosting service.

Here's an informative (and funny) talk on why self-hosting email in its current state is probably a bad idea.

[–] takeda@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 points 2 days ago

I have this problem for a while as well. Similar to you all mechanisms are implemented multiple sites say the configuration is correct, even headers in Gmail say DKIM and SPF passed. E-mail arrives everywhere except for gmail.

Thanks for posting, at least I know I'm not the only one.

[–] x7HlPDq9dSNO6v3A9@lemmy.world 25 points 2 days ago (5 children)

I run my own mailserver in docker and it's not so hard! There was some difficulty at the start with mail going to spam, but after a little while "warming up" the IP with usage, it works fine. It's hardest to build an IP's reputation in the beginning because if your mail goes to spam, it doesn't typically lead to healthy conversations that can support it's history.

My trick was to forward all my incoming gmail messages from the account I was replacing into the new server - that way I could receive and reply from the new mailserver if people sent mail to the old one. Once it built up a bit of a history it started working fine, and that took maybe a few conversations over a couple of days.

The thing I have noticed is that you very quickly get destroyed by incoming spam - a more advanced filter is definitely on the list.

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[–] elvith@feddit.org 16 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Google Groups allows spammers to subscribe you to their groups in a workspace account, but doesn't allow you to unsubscribe since you're not part of that workspace account... Worse - all autoresponders for the spam will also be forwarded to all members of said group.

Since I do not participate in Google Groups, the nuclear option is to file all mails from Google Groups as spam with a Sieve script.

Note the require part may be too large as may sieve script also contains more rules than this one.

require ["body", "date", "editheader", "envelope", "fileinto", "imap4flags", "mailbox", "regex", "reject", "variables"];

if anyof(
    header :contains "List-Subscribe" "groups.google.com",
    header :matches "X-Google-Group-Id" "*"
   ) {
	if header :matches "Subject" "*" {
		set "subject" "${1}";
	} else {
		set "subject" "";
	}
	deleteheader "Subject";
	addheader :last "Subject" "[Google-Groups-Spam] ${subject}";

	fileinto "Junk";
}
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[–] mlg@lemmy.world 7 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (3 children)

They claim its for spam prevention which is why most ISPs actually also block outgoing SMTP port 25.

The dumb thing is, all it really does is push spammers onto using botted/stolen accounts which work way more effectively, and everyone else is forced to set up their email with Google or Microsoft.

If your domain isn't big enough to be recognized, all that SPF and DMARC won't mean crap to them.

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[–] fbinin@mastodon.fbin.in 13 points 2 days ago (1 children)

@laurenceOfSuburbia
This ain't anything new. They have been doing this for decades and will still do it forever. Just move on with it, since it like trying to figure out something which has no meaning at all.
Just know for sure that every company has systems designed by some developer based on a whimsical mindset of someone at the very top. So, I can care less for these stupid companies and their useless management.

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[–] justme@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 2 days ago

i never had problems with Google, but Outlook always blocks my emails, just because it's not a standard .com .net etc domain...

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