Self hosted email continues to steeply decline

The only way around this seems to be hosting with Google, Microsoft, or maybe Proton. Any other ideas?

Unfortunately this only talks about what DMARC policies are published by domains. I was hoping they will go into some analysis of how many mailboxes actually hard-enforce DMARC rules on ingress (as in, respect the DMARC policy as published by the sender's domain, p=reject or whatever else it might be)

I have been hesitant to enforce DMARC rules on my server. Partly because maintaining it was a pain (see opendmarc - maybe better with rspamd now), but also because on my test runs I saw plenty of legitimate incoming mail that simply would get rejected if I were to enforce DMARC on ingress.

I suspect big players like gmail have some kind of soft enforcement/reputation/machine learning approach to DMARC, but this is way too much work for a small time admin like me.

The only thing I think can compete with that is some kind of decentralized solution, also something I've thought about a bit. Like a Keyoxide-based[0] - or similar - setup that makes it virtually impossible for one to lose their online identity (since lost keys can be rotated out once one has - access to - enough proofs), and then that identity can be used - without fear - to route associated data, etc. Of course adoption of what could become an adjacent or new standard would be the next hurdle to overcome...

[0] https://keyoxide.org/

https://gitlab.com/here_forawhile/tmail

I've written about it five years ago, still applies: https://schumacher.sh/2021/05/10/running-a-private-mail-serv...

I've self-hosted for about 2 months, and promptly switched to iCloud. Just because I've been spending too much time calling people and telling them to check their spam folders.

Recently our business moved to another domain. We had a guy who has spent over a month "warming up" traffic, so our new domain won't be tagged as spam by default.

The problem lies with the big e-mail providers marking your e-mail as spam, even if you have everything configured right (MX, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, etc.) and you're not on any blacklists. They use their mysterious opaque algo to determine that your e-mail is spam and you have no idea what you could do to not get in peoples junk boxes.

Also had a couple of ui pages on our app to have full email functionality.

This also means custom integration into our existing ecosystem.

I've done it for decades, but I don't know much beyond the basics of email hosting tbh, however my understanding is that these days email coming from self-hosted servers carries a much higher spam/junk risk and so often automatically marked as spam.

Maybe there are ways to avoid this happening, but when a few clients all reported that they were not receiving my emails I didn't have much of a choice but to switch.

I used Gmail for Domains for a hot minute, but never really liked it very much. Soon I found Fastmail, and I've been using them ever since (so about 13 years now).

It was complicated to get security, DNSSEC, DKIM, DMARC right this way. I did it just under a year ago, around September 15, 2025.

I tried to follow and understand what I was doing, and keep good records on it. It was a complicated process, but everything was up and working at the end and I received email my server sent me. It felt good to be able use this simple script to send myself email:

     #!/usr/bin/env python3

     import smtplib
     from email.message import EmailMessage
     
     msg = EmailMessage()
     msg["From"] = "(user's from address)"
     msg["To"] = "(my gmail address)"
     msg["Subject"] = "(a test subject)"
     msg.set_content("(a test body)")

     with smtplib.SMTP("127.0.0.1", 25, timeout=30) as smtp:
         smtp.send_message(msg)
     
     print("Message submitted successfully to local Postfix.")

I understand that as my server's reputation grows, it becomes very powerful to be able to email anyone without any intermediary except potential spam filters. I am very careful about what I put on my server.

Nevertheless, I had a recent experience that was a little sad for me. I wanted to forward some mail to my gmail address automatically, and used ChatGPT Sol 5.6 on medium thinking time to help me with the administration to do this. (I find extra high and pro thinking times are excessively long.)

I was very disappointed with the results, which included a very badly written regex for authentication. I'll write up my experience in an experience report. It was a big disappointment for me.

The burden on administrating one's own email is already very large, and it is disappointing that we can't really rely on frontier models to help with it.