Interesting history and analysis of SMTP’s history. How can we prevent fedi and other open protocols from suffering the same fates?
Sure, you can run one, good luck getting even a halfway decent delivery rate to mailboxes at any major mail provider. Even if they never receive a spam message from your server, your server is an “unknown” which counts against you. And if one person in your small company of 10 or 100 or even 1000 people gets their e-mail hacked and sends spam? Prepare for the rest of them to get punished for it. Running an SMTP server is a nightmare which is why, over time, more and more of the economy has just shifted their SMTP servers to organizations who professionally run SMTP servers instead of having their own.
I am running my own mailsever for over 10 years without any blacklisting problems…
Right, but try doing that with a 10 day old server created in 2024. That’s the hurdle people are referring to.
I work as a Sysadmin for a web host who sells VPS’s. I’ve helped many people setup domains on their server to cover SPF, DKIM and DMARC passes on a daily basis. Most use these for personal or business level mail delivery without issue.
Are there hurdles to overcome? Sure. But it’s not exactly hard as long as you have a IP that’s isnt a poor reputation (which as an ISP we help delist and improve). But it’s not impossible.
Its more “convenient” to use a third party mail provider just as Office365 since you pass on all that setup and responsibility onto their framework, but it’s not hard to setup a decent level of mail service yourself.
That’s not why people move to big hosters.
They move because you don’t need to waste money managing them, and they have reliable backup
We used to host our own, but big providers are so cheap and have such a good interface that it doesn’t make sense to host our own.
It’s the same reason why most companies don’t host their own web servers.
Even large corporations use AWS or similar.
You’re spot on, and even smaller ISPs routinely get blocked by larger hosters (anyone who doubts this, please look around for the many stories along the lines of “gmail silently drops my email”)
Residential IP blocks are scored much higher and given a negative trust from the start - not surprising since that’s where much of the world’s spam comes from through compromised computers, routers etc.
