Repeating my long-standing offer:
If you are self-hosting email and are having trouble delivering to big providers like Gmail, Outlook, etc - I'm ready and willing to help.
It IS possible. Many small, low volume senders like me routinely get through without being flagged as spam.
I respect his opinion but don't like this:
https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren/117548461064620475
If someone is willing to fight this fight it should be encouraged!
It can be hard, yeah, especially starting out. But it's possible.
And every small site that goes online and stays online makes it easier for the next site.
Nov 3, 2026, 11:31 PM@aaron Yes saying that you shouldn't manage your own stuff doesn't help. I have been managing my own mail server for 20 years. It's harder because of all the new stuff, but it still works. Main issue is mailing lists though. But even with mailing lists on the same mail server we still get through to gmail, outlook and others, using an IP from a public VPS provider, so not the best reputation.
If everyone stops, then it will sure be impossible to do without the large ISPs... :-(
@aaron i too have also been fighting this fight. I self host my email both receiving and sending. While the IP range my VPS is on occasionally slips into a blacklist, it eventually emerges. I dunno if I could be as much help though. It’s a bit of a black art for me.
The important part for me getting through big vendors is to respect DKIM/SPF/DMARC.
@agentultra That's all a huge part, yes; There's other weirdnesses too. I'm happy to provide a second set of eyes.
@aaron Do you have any posts or guides to those other weirdnesses?
@agentultra It's all in a very lossy format called "I'm ADHD and have been doing this for twenty years, describe your problem."
Which is why I'm offering to help when an issue is identified.
@aaron Ah very good. I do a bunch of other things. My DMARC policy is set to reject. I use spamassassin. fail2ban. I don't relay any mail. No password logins, all SSH.
I only have occasional problems getting mail delivered. Usually when my IP range ends up trapped in a temporary blacklist.
@agentultra Honestly compiling a best practice guide / wiki / knowledge base type thing isn't a bad idea. As long as it doesn't turn into another broken thing like StackExchange.
Nov 4, 2026, 7:05 AM@aaron @agentultra, I'm so glad to see there are more people doing this! Compiling a guide would definitely be a good thing, but just compiling it is not enough: it should be maintained and updated as things progress and change.
I too am self-hosting my email and am absolutely pissed that delivering to #GmailIsNotEmail is a royal pain in the ass: even if Google's own Postmaster Tools indicates full compliance, my emails to people I hadn't contacted before often ended up in their spam mailbox without me or them knowing. At the same time, "deliverability analysis" would not report anything due to "too low level of incoming messages". I ended up setting up a cron job just to send emails to my Gmail mailbox a few times each hour in order to overcome the volume issue, and now at least that complaint is gone (funny, the analysis now says that over 0.1% of my messages are marked as spam, even though their own Spam dashboard indicates no such thing).
As for DMARC, I'm using a free service from Postmark: they receive all my DMARC reports and send me a weekly email with overall stats for the week. For me, this has been working fine for quite a while.
@agentultra Oh it's worth looking at the DMARC reports.
There needs to be a reasonable parser those, it's all XML ( ewww. ) I don't have time myself.
Nov 3, 2026, 3:25 AM@aaron Right now, I can deliver mail to Gmail, but it goes to spam (DKIM, DMARC, SPF set up, maybe needs tuning). Outlook has me blocked, and there's a royal PITA procedure to get off the list. But I'm swapping VPS providers soon. Hope some of the reputation carries over when the silos see my IP changed...
@cr1901 If you want me to take a look and see if I can find anything amiss, all I'll need for now is the domain name.
Nov 3, 2026, 4:54 PM@aaron Domain is wdj-consulting.com
@cr1901 I'm going to reply with details via DM.
Nov 3, 2026, 7:52 AM@aaron With a little effort, it is certainly possible to host your own services, email included. I have been doing just that since before the millennium (although my current setup is somewhat evolved). Perhaps this piece https://nxdomain.no/~peter/they_do_not_understand_mail_at_all.html with the references therein could bue useful to others too.
@aaron Another self-hoster here. It's a PITA (especially blocking spam from MS/Outlook), but still doable and worth it.
Shout out to the @exim maintainers. And strength to you.
Nov 4, 2026, 2:09 AM@aaron I'm curious what you do beyond SPF, DKIM, DMARC...?
@mason That's about it.
There's lots of subtle ways to put those in mostly working state that gets mail rejected, though.
And maybe other things as well. For example, DNS latency matters - discovered this assisting someone last year.
@aaron
Self hoster since 1997.
Most of the time it works, but sometimes sent mail disappears or is bounced. Then I fall-back to a professional hoster and re-send. Mostly microsoft indeed.
Oftentimes automatic corporate emails also don’t arrive, but normal correspondence works. Different providers or Outlook settings on their part, I guess.
Nov 4, 2026, 6:58 AM