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Inspired by a recent post about email server software. The biggest hurdle to self-hosting email is large providers (especially gmail) putting your mail into spam regardless of whether or not you conform to the latest smtp standards (spf, dkim, dmarc, mta-sts), leading many to believe the large providers consider IP reputation as the most important signal for spam. Surprisingly many lobsters reported having no issues with their self-hosted email being automatically put into spam by google.

If you are able to self-host outgoing mail and have had no issues with the largest providers unconditionally placing your email into spam, would you mind sharing what hosting provider you use?

Edit: Posting email relays is OK but specifically looking for VPS providers where one’s own private SMTP server can be hosted to avoid passing plaintext to an unnecessary 3rd party.

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      I personally have my emails fully managed by fastmail, but I’ve looked deeply into email relays for outgoing mail. I’ve posted the list on another website. I’m copy pasting it here.

      If you don’t mind Big Tech, Amazon SES is worth looking into. Otherwise, here is a few others: (I’m not gonna put links, but your favorite search engine should lead you to them)

      If you don’t mind large corporations:

      • SendGrid which was bought up by Twilio
      • Mailgun which was originally a branch of Rackspace
      • Mailjet which was a French startup, but which was squired by Mailgun a few years ago. It’s now owned by a Swedish Holdings company.
      • Brevo which used to be called “SendInBlue” which is a French company
      • Scaleway Transactional Email which is the French amazon SES

      If you’re looking for SMEs you have:

      • EmailLabs which is a Polish startup (it looks to have been bought by a Polish Holdings company since I wrote this list the first time)
      • smtp2go which is a medium business from New Zealand
      • mxroute which is a small business from Texas

      If you’re looking for a bunch of people in their garage, there is:

      • migadu.com which is done by 3 swiss people
      • purelymail.com which is maintain by what looked to be a 1-person company in the US
      • mailwip.com which is the same setup

      I’m sure there are others I don’t know.

      I specified the locations, because when talking about emails, many people are concerned about local speech regulations and privacy laws.

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        Fastmail can also be used as a pure email relay, btw. It’s what I’m doing and it has been working very well for me.

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          I use and like migadu for my vanity domains, but never had the impression that they offer “relay for outgoing mail” as a service, and kind of had the impression that they might be unhappy if you used them that way with any meaningful volume at all. I’d suggest asking them before doing so.

          I’ve also looked for this kind of service, and mxroute is my favorite of the ones you listed. For purely transactional emails from a web site or similar, zoho’s zeptomail (they’re certainly in the medium-large corporation category) is quite good, IMO.

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            I’ve been using smtp2go for outgoing mail for the last couple of years, and it’s been completely satisfactory.

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              I run a service that primarily sends email. We send email ourself but from a really shitty IP range (Digital Ocean) so for picky receivers we use relays. I can mirror what you said.

              SES is a good price and good service. They also have regional diversity which can be a pro if you need reliability or annoying because you need to shard/balance between them. My only complaint is that self-managed DKIM broke last year as they have started mangling headers that the docs say that you are allowed to sign. But honestly I may just like them use their own DKIM keys, I have bigger security issues to worry about.

              I’ve also recently started using https://www.sendamatic.net/ and they seem to be pretty good with a great price. Plus pay-as-you-go like SES. I think this provide falls into the “people in their garage” category.

              Also there is going to be a bit of a difference for “human mail services” and things that are more “SMTP relay”. For your list MXroute, Migadu and Purelymail are more focused on providing mailboxes along with sending service, they may not appreciate higher volume. Many of the others are focused on more transactional email.

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                  Perhaps small to medium enterprises? Not sure.

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                    Sorry, I complain about people using too many acronyms, and use some myself :D

                    What Hales said, “small and medium enterprises”

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                  I currently use Hetzner and they make you wait a month and then write a letter to their support line to enable outgoing SMTP, which is kinda annoying but quite reasonable all things considered. I’ve never had issues with being able to actually send stuff to gmail or such.

                  I just have an SPF record; someday I’ll learn how DMARC or DKIM works, but not today. My IP was listed on Spamhaus when I got it, but I went through their review process and cleared that up.

                  I do also have an ancient gmail account, that I use basically only as a backup these days. It just forwards to my self-hosted server. I don’t know if that factors into Google’s blocking policy at all, but I’d be kinda surprised if it didn’t.

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                    Hello (hosting-)neighbor! I don’t remember having to write a letter to support, but it’s been a few years since I started hosting my mail at hetzner (cloud even). I haven’t encountered any trouble with gmail so far, but I have been using the same IP with DKIM, SPF for years and don’t really do bulk-mail so that might help.

                    Anyway, gmail is going to start enforcing new regulations w.r.t deliverability according to mailgun they are going to require DMARC, at least for bulk-mail https://www.mailgun.com/blog/deliverability/gmail-and-yahoo-inbox-updates-2024/#chapter-1

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                      Yeah I switched to Hetzner the middle of last year, so it might be a new policy. Previous host was Linode, which was similarly trouble-free for me.

                      Thanks for the info. I doubt I send 5000 emails per year, let alone per day, but I should probably do the Right Thing and get DMARC etc set up anyway.

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                      Thanks for the referral!

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                      For the last ~10 years I have been using Hetzner. In the ~10 years before that Vollmar.net. Never changed the IP aside from the provider change. The data center location was always Germany. Its a small setup with less than five users and a small amount of outgoing mail. Currently my emails reach inboxes managed by Microsoft or Google just fine, but there have been a single digit number of cases over the years where Google or some other mail provider did not accept some of my mails.

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                        Similar situation - 3ish years using Hetzner, same kind of volume, no issues once I got all the SPF/DKIM/DMARC stuff sorted. Occasional emails might go out via my Scaleway secondary but again no issues these days.

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                          I’m another Hetzner VPS user and have hosted my own (very low volume) SMTP relay/forwarder on there. I don’t have DKIM or DMARC set up, but do have an SSL cert and SPF with hard fail as default, allowing on the VPS and a couple of other IPs I send from on the list, and Gmail has been happy with that for several years. I’ve occasionally had things get set as spam to Outlook.com users, but then to be honest pretty much everything from them to Gmail has also got marked as spam, so I don’t worry about it too much :)

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                        Mailgun. I am running a small mailing list using the mailing list software that comes with picolisp. Email is read from the mailbox and then forwarded to a local postfix which submits it to mailgun. With later versions of the picolisp mailing.l you can submit directly to mailgun with SMTP-AUTH at port 587

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                          Hosting your own SMTP in the cloud isn’t hard, but at the start it’s a lot of work. Once set up, maintenance isn’t that hard. Setting up an SMTP server on a cloud VM/Instance isn’t difficult but the posts that say email is reputation based are 100% correct so most VPC providers want some information before they’ll allow you to send outbound SMTP. The best thing to do here is to just pick a your provider and ask what their requirements are. Given that hosting your own email also means having both working DNS for your domain and a set of MX servers to receive mail, you probably want to budget for at least two geographically distinct VPS servers which will run SMTP and possibly Authoritative DNS. Hosting your DNS is also reasonable. It should be easy to host your own email on a pair of VPCs for about $5.00 / server / month or $10.00 / month total.

                          I like email to be as vanilla as possible. This makes me prejudiced against big providers like AWS. There SES service is great but the requirement that you vet each and every outbound email address seems onerous to me. Nonetheless, I understand why AWS does this. If I recall correctly, linode will let you send SMTP messages after a service request to them that provides some identifying information like a copy of a drivers license.

                          To run your own SMTP server and exchange email with Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Mimecast, et al you need to do a minimum of publish SPF records showing which IP address mail comes from for your domain. It’s also becoming a requirement to run DKIM although at the present time, I find that just providing a place to receive DKIM reports is sufficient for at least Google. I expect this requirement to get tighter in the future. With that said, setting up SPF and DKIM isn’t difficult. Sadly, neither DKIM nor SPF actually do anything to prevent spam and most spammers these days have properly configured both.

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                            mail-tester.com helps a lot with fixing problems.

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                            I started rerouting specifically for hotmail.com and live.nl receivers via a VPS at Tilaa (NL) but as of yesterday that ip is now blocked by live.nl and surprisingly my own isp’s ip is whitelisted again. It’s only the free accounts of Microsoft that give me trouble here and there.

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                              The only domain I consistently fail to send email to is mit.edu. They use Microsoft.

                              The “contact us if you believe this is in error” message is bounced by the same system.

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                              The biggest hurdle to self-hosting email is large providers (especially gmail) putting your mail into spam regardless of whether or not you conform to the latest smtp standards (spf, dkim, dmarc, mta-sts), leading many to believe the large providers consider IP reputation as the most important signal for spam.

                              Could you give details? IP and domain maybe?

                              The thing is that companies such as Mailchimp, Sendgrid, etc. advertise or sell new IPs to not be bogged down by all their shared stuff being blacklisted, cause someone sent spam. A test mail with all the headers could also be nice.

                              Sometimes the big ones are unhappy about some small little detail in the setup. Sometimes simply adding the IP to a whitelist popular solves all problems.

                              The main thing where I’ve seen people actually struggling is when an IP really was used to send out spam, in which case I think every sane provider would give you a new IP if you contact their support.

                              Sometimes one of these email testing sites that you send an email to and they give you feedback can give a hint. For example forgetting to switch from ~all to -all in the SPF, which I think Google doesn’t like. So valid setup, but not to someone’s liking. One more thing I have seen is setting everything up in the DNS perfectly, but forgetting to set up PTR (Reverse DNS) for the IP, because you usually do that in your providers web interface not where you set up the rest of DNS. Also such things are often not mentioned or only as an easy to overlook side sentence when following some guide.

                              That said, I am using Hetzner, used a company called Keyweb before. Both of them had no issues. The main reason to switch from Keyweb is that it was an ancient VPS (early 2000s) and I wanted a dedicated server. New domains, new IPs never caused issues while switching. Was straight forward and I just kept the old server running for a bit in case something ended up on the old one, but only spam did.

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                                I’ve used Linode and AWS with a perfect setup (all of the required DNS setup that I mentioned including -all in SPF and reverse DNS ptr). I’ve sent countless conformance test emails and have received perfect scores. Google’s own header check in Gmail also confirms everything is correct. I’ve changed IPs in their systems many times as well and still no luck. I’ve used new domains and still no luck. The only thing that worked was moving to a relay service.

                                Some people here have said they had success with hetzner and some have said they have been marked as spam from hetzner. This is discouraging, it really could be a lottery issue.

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                                  I think it largely is a lottery issue. And it depends who you send mail to. The mail filtering in front of many MS Exchange servers caused me considerable issues and didn’t seem to be soluble in any other way than relaying.

                                  But some people here probably rarely or never send email to such sites. So they won’t notice the problem.

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                                I’m hosting my domains (including e-mail) at PCextreme, a Dutch company. I had no complaints about their service. Unfortunately, it got bought up by Versio, a Dutch budget hosting company which was looking to expand their operation. I’m not happy about this - I started at Versio with shared hosting, which was terrible. Then I moved to a VPS, which was also terrible (I don’t know how you can mess up virtualization, but apparently you can. There were lots of issues and when informed they just moved the host to a different hypervisor, and then other problems started cropping up).

                                After I moved to PCextreme, I noticed that sometimes my hostnames didn’t resolve. I was still relying on Versio’s DNS infrastructure, which apparently is also very shitty. So now I’m running nsd on my VPSes.

                                I’ve thought about moving away from Versio but the hassle involved makes me reconsider. I don’t have as much free time to mess around with fiddly computer shit as I used to. So for now I stay where I am, but I cannot recommend it at all. The only thing I can say is that so far I’ve had no real IP-related issues on IPv4, but IPv6 seems to be steadily blocked by major providers (I think especially Google). This seems to be a systemic problem many people seem to deal with, and preferring IPv4 for outgoing mail when possible is a bandaid solution that seems to work.

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                                  My mailserver runs on Hetzner. I relay all outgoing email to Amazon SES which pretty much solved by (mild) deliverability issues.

                                  However the logging/admin panel is not good and it’s hard to see what happened to an individual piece of mail.

                                  Hetzner is fine but I don’t know that I could recommend Amazon SES overall.

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                                    I setup my personal nextcloud instance to use GMX.com as they support SMTP.

                                    But I did a sendmail drop-in that sends stuff to Telegram.

                                    https://github.com/lucasew/telegram-sendmail

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                                      Self hosted VPS from IONOS (ionos.com) in an UK datacenter. Apparently, the UK IP ranges have a good reputation and I never had any issues (compared to IP ranges from Hetzner which is a near sure guarantee to end up in Spam).,

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                                        I don’t have any recent experience with this, I stopped trying to self-host email in 2011 (I think?) because of deliverability issues. But that was me trying to host on a home internet connection with a rotating IP address, so extra super hard challenge mode.

                                        I want to add a related question: Does anyone have a recommendation for a cheap SMTP relay(? service I can forward my outbound SMTP through so it come from their IP) that specifically allows for using for personal communication without requiring an unsubscribe link? I want someone else to handle deliverability of my sent mail, but have my incoming mail go directly to a self-hosted mail server. (Except maybe as a backup if my server is temporarily down.)

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                                          I will unreservedly recommend SMTP2GO. Their free plan allows you to send 1,000 per month.

                                          I use them with DeltaChat to avoid Migadu’s monthly sending limits (which are more then enough for “normal” email usage but when I’m using email like a instant messenger).

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                                            I’m switching to using Purelymail for my personal email. Although that’s for both sending and receiving (but you could probably use it just for sending just fine).

                                            For non-personal transactional email I’m using SendGrid for sending it (free tier allows sending 100 emails per day). As far as I know, an unsubscribe link would only be required on marketing emails, so it should be fine to not have one (and SendGrid does not put one if you’re just sending raw HTML/plaintext emails through them). A note on SendGrid: If you’re like me and very rarely send email, you have to set up something to send a “keep-alive” email every so often, otherwise they will close your account for inactivity.

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                                            forwardemail is fully open source and works great

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                                              I have had no issue with my emails going to spam. I host with a friend’s space in a Seattle colo, but I also have used vultr.com for hacking on 9front’s mail server (dkim implementation, etc), and had no deliverability issues to gmail, even without dkim.

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                                                Linode and Vultr have both worked for me for many years. There were a few incidents of issues with Microsoft, Yahoo, and ntlworld over the past 9 years.