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Ask HN: Does self-hosting your email mean that you'll be flagged for spam?

5 points by dmos62 ↗ HN
I'd like to host my family's emails. Maintenance is not a problem. What I'm concerned about is being flagged for spammed (due to using Digital Ocean or similar). I'd like to know what those of you who self-host can say about that.

There was a related thread two days ago [0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18511650

7 comments

[ 283 ms ] story [ 1010 ms ] thread
zzo38computer
I have not had problems with this (although I am going through my ISP's SMTP server to send, using my own SMTP server to receive; if you are installing Exim by the Debian package manager, select "smarthost" from the menu to enable this function)

(Also, I use multiple email addresses on my computer, although all of them are my own; I do not host any email for anyone else, although you can just as well use the same software to host email for other people too.)

dmos62
Never thought of using a third-party relay SMTP server. That's a great idea.

Gmail has a relay [0][1], but I'm not sure if it's still free now that the G Suite free tier is gone.

Amazon SES [2] has competitive pricing, or it's free (first 62,000 emails per month) if you're using EC2 for sending email.

Then there's a bunch of marketing oriented SMTP providers that have free tiers. E.g. mailjet [3].

[0] https://kinsta.com/knowledgebase/free-smtp-server/

[1] https://support.google.com/a/answer/2956491?hl=en

[2] https://aws.amazon.com/ses/pricing/

[3] https://www.mailjet.com/pricing/

zzo38computer
I meant the ISP's server; it should come with your internet service (at no extra charge) if they provide a SMTP server.
morpheuskafka
Most people's ISP these days is AWS/GCP/Azure, so that's not an option for most anymore.
dmos62
Yeah, but I don't have a long-term ISP. Anyway, I don't see any disadvantage in using a non-ISP SMTP relay.
danieltillett
Yes. In theory no, but in practice the big the providers just randomly disappear a certain percentage of your emails. They don't get marked as junk, just never get to the recipient. After 15 years of running my own email server I gave up and paid one of the commercial suppliers to ensure my emails arrived.
funkaster
I do this for my personal email, but use AWS SES for sending. So far, no emails have been flagged/lost.