After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel. The oligopoly has won.
Email is now an oligopoly, a service gatekept by a few big companies which does not follow the principles of net neutrality.
►https://cfenollosa.com/blog/after-self-hosting-my-email-for-twenty-three-years-i-have-thrown-in-the-
This doesn’t only affect contrarian nerds
No need to trust my word. Google has half a billion results for “my email goes directly to spam”.
Search any technical forum on the internet and you will find plenty of legitimate people complaining that their emails are not delivered.
What’s the usual answer from experienced sysadmins? “Stop self-hosting your email and pay [provider].”
Having to pay Big Tech to ensure deliverability is unfair, especially since lots of sites self-host their emails for multiple reasons; one if which is cost.
Newsletters from my alumni organization go to spam. Medical appointments from my doctor who has a self-hosted server with a patient intranet go to spam. Important withdrawal alerts from my bank go to spam. Purchase receipts from e-commerces go to spam. Email notifications to users of my company’s SaaS go to spam.
You can no longer set up postfix to manage transactional emails for your business. The emails just go to spam or disappear.
(...)
Big email servers permanently blacklist whole IP blocks and delete their emails without processing or without notice. Some of those blacklists are public, some are not.
When you investigate the issue they give you instructions with false hopes to fix deliverability. “Do as you’re told and everything will be fine”.
