Despite the common consensus, self hosting your outbound email it's not impossible to do (*)

bgp.tools has been sending it's own outbound email since day one of having the ability to send email, while i have been doing a migration i have discovered that rspamd (for DKIM signing) was keeping it's own logs outside of journalctl, meaning they never got rotated (grrr)

The upside of this log rotation failure is that I can give you this graph: The total email volume sent per month via bgp.tools

I don't think it has been particularly hard (other than hotmail) to run this, and it means that I don't have to give customer emails to another 3rd party.

I think the only struggle for a lot of people is that it's quite difficult to find "clean" or at least "boring" IPs to send out from. i suspect you probably couldn't replicate these results with Hetzner/Digital Ocean/etc without some serious fighting or luck

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(*) unless your service depends on sending to hotmail/live/msn emails, because that shit is impossible

@benjojo > I don’t think it has been particularly hard (other than hotmail)

i feel seen

@benjojo As I've said repeatedly: It's not hard until it is. If your IP is clean you're great, but the moment you/your range ends up on a list you are screwed for a very long time.

Also if you need to send to outlook addresses. Give up now and turn back.

@jonty enterprise outlook has been zero problems, all of the Microsoft free mail is fucked, but that seems to be a wider policy on Microsoft's end at this point

@benjojo Admittedly the last time I screamed about this was four years ago, but my experience was the exact opposite.

I hate email.

@benjojo I wonder his well this works from residential / business IPs (static of course 💀).

As someone who has a Microslop email, I can confirm it's terrible sometimes. Confirmation emails for some services are just never received, not even in spam.

@hisold I don't think residential IPs have worked for a long time, but if depending on your ISP a business line should be fine

Confirmation emails for some services are just never received, not even in spam.

Yeah bgp.tools just refuses to deal with Live/MSN/Hotmail/live.com emails because it's not worth the frustration for the user and me

@benjojo the point exactly is the sending IP address. The absolute mayor problem with self hosted mail.

@benjojo I read someone hosted everything at home but tunneled the LAN services to a hosted minimal (and cheap) server using wireguard *_*

@olea Yeah this is not the case with bgp.tools, it has it's own IPs (for I was the only user of), so there has never been any history with these addresses

@benjojo @hisold whether residential IPs will work also depends on your ISP

like with my ISP, I don't think there's any way for a receiving mail server to tell whether I have a business or residential line (and based on what other users of the same ISP have said I should be fine to host a mail server at home, although I currently don't and send from OVH instead)