[horusthegame]

> "You just cannot create another first-class node of this network.

Uh, yeah, you can, I did it again recently. I've done it at Oracle Cloud, AWS Lightsail, Linode, GoDaddy, and several ISP's before that. I could start right this minute with Digital Ocean, Vultr, etc. pick one and be up and running, delivering email to Gmail, Microsoft, etc. in a day.

Each time one of these articles is posted, I feel I must be some kind of email savant.

[baobabKoodaa]

Here's the recipe: set up your own email server. Tweak configuration until eventually a test email from yourself to yourself lands in the inbox, then call it a day. Never actually measure your deliverability. Never investigate why you sometimes don't get replies to emails where you were expecting to get a reply to. In fact, just close your eyes and stick fingers in your ears. Then go on HN and talk about how easy it is to do this thing which you, totally, for real, really did do, like, for reals for reals.

[nulld3v]

Measuring deliverability is really not that hard. You do the following:

- Setup blacklist monitoring (e.g. HetrixTools/MXToolbox)

- Check if you can email Gmail

- Check if you can email Hotmail

- Check if you can email Office365

- Check on Microsoft SNDS that you are not blocked: https://sendersupport.olc.protection.outlook.com/snds/

Gmail, Hotmail and Office365 are the largest email providers and also the most strict ones.

I have accounts on all of these providers so testing deliverability is trivial. You could argue that testing deliverability with one account is unreliable but in my experience it simply is not. Usually you send a couple emails across a week and if they all go through you are good.

If you are paranoid, you can ask if any of your friends have Office365/Hotmail and email them. They probably have company or university accounts on there.

My server has only been blocked once after all this, and ironically it was by another company that self-hosts their email...

[horusthegame]

> Here's the recipe

We read from different cookbooks and my reading comprehension is high. My sent email stats shows over 20K successfully sent emails just for my personal account, since 1999, when I started tracking it.

[chrisandchris]

It's like coffee. For every study that says A, there's one that contradicts it.

I feel like for every pro host-your-own-mail on HN there is one that contradicts it.

[hilux]

I went down an internet rathole on coffee grinders. (I realize you were probably referring to health benefits.)

After many hours of this over many months, I finally looked for a comparison of the actual taste of coffee from cheap grinders versus 10-20x more expensive burr grinders. (As opposed to comparisons of grinder technologies, which are everywhere.)

There are almost no published side-by-side taste comparisons; when I did find one, the cheap grinders had won!

[roughly]

You should write an article on how you’re doing it!

[ink_13]

Sure, but how long would your new server keep working (i.e., delivering mail to GMail, etc)? Do you know some magic incantation for staying off the naughty lists?

Setting up a server is trivial, yes. Keeping it going is a never-ending treadmill of not really technical problems.

[LinuxBender]

Do you know some magic incantation for staying off the naughty lists?

Not magic, but when I managed outgoing Postfix servers for a few companies I had to set rate limits for yahoo.com an a couple other domains to reduce concurrency or they would block one of the SNAT's for a while. It probably sounds tedious but it really wasn't. There were not many MX that were as strict as Yahoo. I never ran into issues with Gmail but I think they cut some slack for corporate IP addresses and domain names.

For my own personal email servers I never had issues because I never sent at a rate that anyone cared about. The closest I got to that was running a forum that would email when threads would get updated and people subscribed to them but my solution there was to suggest to the people on the forum not to do that.

[horusthegame]

> Sure, but how long would your new server keep working (i.e., delivering mail to GMail, etc)?

I can't see the future, if the big email providers who likely have some of their trolls posting in the comments ever decide to start choking out us personal email server runners, then it'd be game over. If things remain for the next 20 years assuming I live that long then deliverability would be 100% for the next 20 years.

> Do you know some magic incantation for staying off the naughty lists?

I don't spam, that and don't make a finger fumble edit like I did the one time in over 20 years and didn't check to make sure it was working correctly first.

Also, I use http://www.mxtoolbox.com/ to keep an eye on my server.