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
I hate it. it was supposed to be open standard
Microsoft Exchange and the web-based Outlook probably still has a plurality of email volume, because of their dominance in enterprise. Even on the web based consumer space, Apple and Yahoo still have significant market share.
I work for state government and even we have trouble with email reputation issues from the big orgs. It’s a pain for everyone.
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.
I had a small problem with this, but Linode (others do that, too) allowed me to allocate myself a /56 and that solved it. Since IPv6 is preferred if set up - it’s the protocol that gets used. And so my reputation problems went away.
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.
I put dog shit in my ass and Google knew five minutes before it happened, filmed it, and sold it back to me as a custom highlight of my home alone shenanigans. I find this a bit egregious, personally.
They claim its for spam prevention which is why most ISPs actually also block outgoing SMTP port 25.
The dumb thing is, all it really does is push spammers onto using botted/stolen accounts which work way more effectively, and everyone else is forced to set up their email with Google or Microsoft.
If your domain isn’t big enough to be recognized, all that SPF and DMARC won’t mean crap to them.
Do you send enough email to classify for Google to allow you to contest your status as spam? Because there is a minimum.
Google can still automatically mark your message as spam if enough people mark it as such or you trigger spam identification too often (this can happen if you send frequent test emails with not much in them) - it’s not neccesarily an attack on you. But plenty of spammers will send perfectly well verified emails today, so you are just caught in the crossfire.
Try sending a gmail account you still have access to a couple of genuine looking mails (eg. At least a paragraph of legible text and with a signature), then marking the messages as not spam. That worked for me. Even after that though, one line messages can still trigger the spam detection.
I’ve started mine and it works fine. All the Google shit goes straight to the bin though.
IP rep?
