Self hosting these days is almost impossible because most email providers like gmail and yahoo mail will automatically move your emails to spam. It’s all based on IP address and how reliable that IP address is. Self hosting guarantees that all your sent email will end up in spam folders.
Same here. I setup a new email server last month and most every big email service made it pretty easy to get whitelisted, but not Microsoft. They're a total pita to deal with. Google made it very easy.
My server is a "Mail-in-a-Box" running on a DigitalOcean VPS.
Same here, been hosting for over a decade now. You do need to be on top of all the latest technologies, and still some problems will arise once in a while. But all in all, it's a pretty smooth operation.
Why not receive all mail on your server and send your mail through your isp.
That way no one reads the emails sent to you and the ones that you send get through (and outbound privacy is not expected if you are sending to gmail or another provider anyhow).
That also makes it harder to track conversations and would take manual work to recreate the conversation threads.
This isn't true at all. I self-host email, with full SPF/DKIM/dmarc, ESMTP, and my email isn't rejected anywhere. I'm sending and receiving via a Digital Ocean VPS. I've had the same IP for six years, and never had a problem.
The bigger problem is finding a hosting provider that hasn't had their entire space blacklisted.
For that, you're likely going to have to pick a "responsible" provider, have a couple of rounds of back and forth with them to prove you're neither an idiot nor a spammer, and ask them to manually open the port for you. And they're going to demand something that will tie to identity.
> Self hosting these days is almost impossible because most email providers like gmail and yahoo mail will automatically move your emails to spam.
This is completely not true. Comes up every time there is a thread related to email. Every time many of us who host our own email servers will explain how it is not true. You can absolutely self-host your email server for your domains, configure it correctly and it will work fine.
gmail has a huge false positive spam identification problem, but it applies to all emails, even those from gmail to gmail.
That's what I used to think, but it does indeed seem to be possible to build a reputation over time. I've been running my own email server for something like 4 years now and emails seem to get through to gmail and outlook accounts almost always at this point.
From talking to other people who tried the same, my theory is that the main reasons for my success were having everything configured well from the very beginning, running on a single static IP for multiple years, hosted at reputable mid-range server provider (not the cheapest, not the most popular) and not sending any "broadcast" email whatsoever for a very long time.
