Marc van Leeuwen
Premium Member
- Joined
- May 29, 2016
- Messages
- 1,178
- Points
- 63
Every time I move a project to a VPS I end up having the same argument with myself about mail. Postfix is not hard to set up. Getting the mail actually delivered is the part that eats the week.
Rough state of it as I know it: you need a PTR record matching your hostname, which the provider has to set for you, then SPF, DKIM signing and a DMARC record. Even with all four correct a fresh IP has no sending history, so the first batch of messages lands in spam at the big providers while reputation builds. Some hosts also keep port 25 closed on new accounts until you open a ticket.
For anything transactional, password resets and order confirmations, I have given up and gone to a relay. The failure mode of self hosted mail is silent. Nobody writes in to say the password reset never arrived, they just stop signing up, and you find out weeks later from a support thread that makes no sense.
Where I am less sure is ordinary business mail for a small team. Low volume, clean IP, no marketing sends. That still feels like something you can run yourself without much pain, but I have not done it on a new IP range recently enough to say.
Anyone here still running their own mail for client work? Curious whether deliverability has got easier or whether I have just been unlucky with the IP blocks I ended up on.
Rough state of it as I know it: you need a PTR record matching your hostname, which the provider has to set for you, then SPF, DKIM signing and a DMARC record. Even with all four correct a fresh IP has no sending history, so the first batch of messages lands in spam at the big providers while reputation builds. Some hosts also keep port 25 closed on new accounts until you open a ticket.
For anything transactional, password resets and order confirmations, I have given up and gone to a relay. The failure mode of self hosted mail is silent. Nobody writes in to say the password reset never arrived, they just stop signing up, and you find out weeks later from a support thread that makes no sense.
Where I am less sure is ordinary business mail for a small team. Low volume, clean IP, no marketing sends. That still feels like something you can run yourself without much pain, but I have not done it on a new IP range recently enough to say.
Anyone here still running their own mail for client work? Curious whether deliverability has got easier or whether I have just been unlucky with the IP blocks I ended up on.
