Comment by citizenpaul
1 hour ago
Yeah, this subject comes up every couple months. The problem is not getting it working. Its that email is a captured system at this point and the real work is various reputation management processes that the big providers control or you can't send email to/from them. They also have no real interest in letting you be your own email provider so its just pushing a rock up a hill grind, for what? To save <$100 a year piggybacking on another provider as a custom domain? or just use a free provider?
Having worked at a provider, that is not the psychology at all. The #1 priority is to keep the mail flowing. #2 incremental improvements to security, spam, reputation is a distant second. The other thing is, providers already know and have people who work on email standards, work in the ecosystem, etc. So once you're inside, with people who know whats going on, know the tools, know how things work intuitively without having to read a manual, theres less desire to change.
I have no personal experience. I've just read a lot of peoples experience around trying to do their own email hosting. It seems the majority give up after a couple years of nonstop blacklisting problems. It could simply be only people with issues post about it.
The stories have discouraged my from spending my time on it though.
As former Email Principal at major provider, sure, they run into blacklisting problems.
However, most of time, it's not that providers are blacklisting because "Ha ha ha, screw the little guy" but more "Yea, they are hosting on IP blocks with terrible reputation and spammers are absolute liars. I refuse to trust whatever they say, period."
If you have your own /24 or greater, you can become email provider. It's also just such a low margin business, it's not worth small businesses disrupting it.
I have found that if you harsh blacklist from most countries you'll never communicate from you'll save a lot of spam.
I blacklisted pretty much all of africa and arabic nations and china on the IP level, ( ensure you get the bgp routed datacenters in those nations too) and not only did i get less spam, but less automated bot attacks on my webserver.
The reason people talk about the blacklist is because its just so damn effective.