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The Hostile Email Landscape (liminality.xyz)

Posted by Soulskill on from the collateral-damage-in-the-war-on-spam dept.

An anonymous reader writes: As we consolidate on just a few major email services, it becomes more and more difficult to launch your own mail server. From the article: "Email perfectly embodies the spirit of the internet: independent mail hosts exchanging messages, no host more or less important than any other. Joining the network is as easy as installing Sendmail and slapping on an MX record. At least, that used to be the case. If you were to launch a new mail server right now, many networks would simply refuse to speak to you. The problem: reputation. ... Earlier this year I moved my personal email from Google Apps to a self-hosted server, with hopes of launching a paid mail service à la Fastmail on the same infrastructure. ... I had no issues sending to other servers running Postfix or Exim; SpamAssassin happily gave me a 0.0 score, but most big services and corporate mail servers were rejecting my mail, or flagging it as spam: Outlook.com accepted my email, but discarded it. GMail flagged me as spam. MimeCast put my mail into a perpetual greylist. Corporate networks using Microsoft's Online Exchange Protection bounced my mail."

2 of 217 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Don't Know How You Made That Conclusion by Z00L00K · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's usually the case when the reverse lookup don't point back to the same domain/name as the server identifies itself with.

    And it's the ISP that need to change the pointer from some generic name to a specific.

    --
    If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
  2. Re:Don't Know How You Made That Conclusion by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There are several factors that I've seen with my mail server.

    1) Do not try to work over a standard ISP service - one that assigns your IP dynamically - because most blacklists and major corporations blacklist dynamic IP pools
    2) Don't host in any of those cheap virtual hosting services - many of them are also blacklisted
    2) Setup DKIM signing (sendmail config and DNS record)
    3) Setup SPF DNS record

    Basically, one has to avoid running one's mail server someplace that is cheap because that is where the SPAMers put their mail servers as well (because they are cheap and easier to do anonymously).