[jayski]

Aside from SPF, DMARC and DKIM, there's the concept of "pre-warming" an IP.

Where you gradually send more and more email throughout a few weeks until you have enough good reputation to send your entire volume. This is the part that's outside of normal configuration and takes more time.

In my particular case I was trying to move a system that sends about 5million legitimate emails per month (notifications for a lot of customers) - off of AWS onto a self hosted solution.

We spend about 2k per month just on sending emails and I thought if I spent a few days on it we could save that money.

Unless your IPs have built a reputation it's not going to work. I could gradually migrate volume, monitor the bounce rate, adjust, etc. But that was more work than I could afford to put into that project. I also couldn't risk getting emails sent to spam while I experimented.

https://www.twilio.com/docs/sendgrid/ui/sending-email/warmin...

[camgunz]

Ah so you were a bulk sender. Yeah that's pretty fraught; AFAIK for Gmail you have to follow their bulk sender guidelines [0], which is a pretty long list of things to do. Not impossible though.

But, again most people aren't sending 5m emails a month. They'll be totally fine setting up their own email server.

[0]: https://support.google.com/a/answer/81126?visit_id=638526753...

[alan-hn]

I had a mail server on a linode for around a year, I tried everything I could to get google to accept my emails and it never did. I only used it as a personal email never did bulk sending. I had to switch to a hosted provider with a custom domain instead because it was such a big headache