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.
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
IP rep?
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 never had problems with Google, but Outlook always blocks my emails, just because it’s not a standard .com .net etc domain…
If you want you can PM me your dkim and dmarc and SPF policy. Or just send me your url and I’ll look it up. I used to fix these for a living. It’s likely an issue with your SPF not being properly annotated.
That’s cool of you to offer that to them.
@laurenceOfSuburbia
This ain’t anything new. They have been doing this for decades and will still do it forever. Just move on with it, since it like trying to figure out something which has no meaning at all.
Just know for sure that every company has systems designed by some developer based on a whimsical mindset of someone at the very top. So, I can care less for these stupid companies and their useless management.It’s basically the same thing Google did with XMPP.
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.
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.
Yeah we should just let them win. Why fight? It’s not like most of the spam and phishing come from Gmail and hotmail accounts. It’s those fucking self hosters
Maybe the way to fight GMail’s outsized power is to stop using GMail. You can do that without going all the way to self-hosting.
Yeah, I figure I did enough of a step by moving to Tutanota. Selfhosting email seems like overkill unless you’re running some large organization or doing self-hosting as a hobby.
How’s your self hosted email going? Any advice you can share to avoid some of the major issues?
I’ve run a mail server since the late 90s. I gave up running my own outbound years ago. Whether it gets received is too inconsistent. Primarily, make sure the IP you use isn’t on any spam lists. If it is, get a new IP or try to submit appeals. Make sure you have the standard anti spam/authenticity measures implemented (they’re listed in the OP).
These are the minimum. Years ago it was enough to have reasonable delivery. Unfortunately these aren’t that helpful anymore because spammers also set them up (often with seemingly randomly generated domain names). I assume because not having them was a fairly strong signal for being a spammer, so now they also set them up, which also means there’s not really any configuration / setup you can do to seem legitimate (aside from mail volume and the content itself which will be analyzed).
Anyway running your own SMTP itself is easy. The problem is getting your mail to the inbox or at least spam/junk folder (your mail may get blackholed and not even show up in spam). At least when you get a rejection, you know something is wrong, but many times the receiving server will indicate a success code and simply not deliver it to the user (not even to their spam).
Interesting! You said you gave up on the outbound, does that mean you can’t reply to mails you receive? But if you can reply, does that mean the sender (let’s assume someone with gmail) will get it or would even that likely end up blackholed or in spam?
I can reply yo emails. It’s what jaybone said – I use a 3rd party outbound (SMTP).
I use Thunderbird as my mail client. In there you can define multiple IMAP/pop accounts (inbound) and multiple SMTP (outbound). So when I click reply, the SMTP I have set for that email address is a 3rd party service that sends emails using my domain.
This does have a privacy implication, so whether that’s appropriate for you is for you to decide. The 3rd party can read and save a copy of your outbound email inclusive of any content included with it (like the email you’re replying to if you include it).
Ah nice, that is a great idea. I will try this out, thanks!
What 3rd party service do you use?
Don’t take this as an endorsement as it’s not really intended to be used for this purpose and I’m probably going to switch, but I’ve been using sendgrid for a few years as I was familiar with it from business use. I was using mandrill before that until they changed their pricing and some other things.
EDIT: also worth mentioning I have a grandfathered free plan.
Maybe they send emails using someone else’s smtp server? (Like some paid service that provides smtp?)
@toxicmode @galoisghost I think those of us who can should selfhost an email address at least to contact other selfhosters even if we can’t use it effectively to contact users of Big Email. That’s how the network effect begins
Think of it like how a lot of the Fedi defederated from Gab or/and Thereads, except that this time it’s Big email that’s forcing the defederation
https://badrihippo.thekambattu.rocks/clog/staying-away-from-big-email/
Stop tempting me! I might do it.
One question, I currently use proton mail to use my domain for email and there are no issues afaik. Do you think a few years of using proton will have “whitelisted” my domain enough or will all the issues pop up once I change to hosting it myself?
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.
Soon not using a chromium browser will probably be considered a bad idea
I get what you mean, but this website specifically works completely fine on my Firefox (with uBlock). Please check your browser settings for things like disabled JavaScript.
Yeah everything is disabled its Firefox focus, everything always worked fine then like this past week all sorts of sites started showing that
Even using a reputable hosting provider and personal domain will get you spam black holed these days
I wonder if there should be some kind of law or regulation around this. It’s an antitrust issue. Though no one in Congress would understand what this is.
There most certainly should. But Americans live in a corporatocracy.
Does gmail not do this kind of blocking outside of the US?
This here. My emails end up in gmail spam folders occasionally from what I am told. And I don’t self-host. I just use a good webhoster and my own domain. Fuck google.
Many hosting providers won’t even let you try, they don’t want to host potential spammers.
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.
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 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.
Self-hosting email is quite the undertaking… I don’t have the energy to deal with it and just pay 10€/year for a hosting service.
Here’s an informative (and funny) talk on why self-hosting email in its current state is probably a bad idea.
*fuck
Self hosting an email server to send mails that don’t get flagged as spam is a nightmare, I’d rather not attempt doing it again. My Lemmy instance is using SMTP2Go and the free tier is more than enough for my current sending capacity needs
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.
You can use MXToolbox to check for blacklists on your IP. If you find any, you can submit to each party to get removed. I’ve done this for a previous company and it was super easy.
Another is most ISPs will put your IP in the PBL so unless you use a relay your outbound email is going nowhere. Google fiber was slow on updating their PBL when they rolled out service in my area so I got to send direct for several months before having to use an external relay.
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
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:
