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.
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.
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.
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.
I do not understand all the people who are too afraid to try email hosting on their own that are out here discouraging people cause they want to sound right.
Email is hard cause people don’t host it enough and the few corps ignore the minority problems.
If more people shift back to hosting email the balance will tip again.
It is fine if you don’t want to host email but telling people not too without even trying yourself is anti-selfhost IMHO.
I use a free outbound smtp relay that lets me do like 5k emails on the free tier. I use it primarily for alerts and Immich updates / new user links. But I don’t do inbound so don’t have to expose any ports. Only time I did was to do validation with the relay so just a few minutes during setup.
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
I hate it. it was supposed to be open standard
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.
Most email providers block new domains… You need to have the DNS records up for like 2 years before they start getting accepted… Or contact all the big doers to get yourself whitelisted
False. It’s a scoring system, where a domain registered within the last 14 days gets a negative score. SPF, DKIM, etc all bump the score up.
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.
One of the problems with self hosting is that a lot of IP addresses have historically been used for spam and still have a bad reputation. If you get assigned one of those IP addresses there’s very little you can do about your mails going to spam.
I had a small problem with this, but Linode (others do that, too) allowed me to allocate myself a /56 and that solved it. Since IPv6 is preferred if set up - it’s the protocol that gets used. And so my reputation problems went away.
You can request to be removed from the list by SpamHaus. Worked for me. But for still need to make sure everything is set up currently (which is true is tedious) or you go right back onto the list.
I work for state government and even we have trouble with email reputation issues from the big orgs. It’s a pain for everyone.
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.
I also self host email and so far haven’t had any problems. Initial setup was annoying but it’s required zero effort this past few years, and I don’t think my emails land in spam folders. Maybe I can help?
Shoot me a message at test-message-lawrenceOfSuburbia@mspencer.net (which I’ll delete after it gets a message, for obvious reasons) and I’ll take a look. (I misspelled the name, I apologize, no insult intended)
Honestly I think I’ve received 10 spam messages in the last four years, and five have been from gmail addresses (Best Buy invoice spam) in the past two months. I submit each one to support.google.com/mail/contact/abuse and hopefully it helps.
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.
I self-hosted my own email for a few years, everything was set up and reporting correctly, but Google just would never have it. I think the worst is it would be a bit inconsistent.
Anyway, I switched to an email provider with my own domain and it’s much more reliable. That is until this week, I have noticed that some services are rejecting my domain. I think there is some whitelisting nonsense going on, but in those instances I just use an alias and that seems to work.
I just want to have control of my data!
I just want to have control of my data!
Google:

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.
They claim its for spam prevention which is why most ISPs actually also block outgoing SMTP port 25.
European ISPs block egress port 25, not American ones, generally. Not sure about the rest of the world.
In Europe, one refuge is to send using the GSM networks, which tend not to block egress 25 for some reason.
not American ones, generally.
Well then screw you AT&T lmao
AT&T is the worst of the worst. And I boycott them for countless reasons like snooping on their own customers voluntarily without a warrant. It’s really a hard-right corp. In any case, never tried them so I didn’t know they blocked egress 25.
One trick that works if truth-in-advertising laws are in force: ask the sales people before subscribing if the block port 25. They always say “no, we block nothing” (in my experience). So you subscribe and sign the contract. Then when you see they actually block 25, you have a false advertising situation and also a contract violation (if either verbal contracts are enforcable or if you can get it in writing that nothing is blocked). So you complain. In my experience, they give a gratis upgrade to an enterprise level of service that generally has a static IP and no blocks – for the price of the residential plan you signed up for.
Running your own email server is also a good way to get a ton of headaches from your isp
Wrong. If you aren’t up to the task of hosting email that’s fine but discouraging others from trying is the opposite direction we should be going.
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.
*fuck
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
requirepart 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"; }autoresponders for the spam will also be forwarded to all members of said group.
This sounds like a pretty effective way to get yourself unsubscribed from groups you don’t want to be in.
They will be drowned in hundreds of „Thanks for your email, but we don’t do support via mail. Please open a ticket at $URL“ and „Thanks for your mail, we will get back to you shortly. Your ticket ID is #123456“. Also everything you add as an auto response will be distributed to all other victims in that group, so I chose to not be a dick.
I’ve started mine and it works fine. All the Google shit goes straight to the bin though.
i never had problems with Google, but Outlook always blocks my emails, just because it’s not a standard .com .net etc domain…







