
Ask HN: Does self-hosting your email mean that you'll be flagged for spam? - dmos62
I&#x27;d like to host my family&#x27;s emails. Maintenance is not a problem. What I&#x27;m concerned about is being flagged for spammed (due to using Digital Ocean or similar). I&#x27;d like to know what those of you who self-host can say about that.<p>There was a related thread two days ago [0].<p>[0] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18511650
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danieltillett
Yes. In theory no, but in practice the big the providers just randomly
disappear a certain percentage of your emails. They don't get marked as junk,
just never get to the recipient. After 15 years of running my own email server
I gave up and paid one of the commercial suppliers to ensure my emails
arrived.

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zzo38computer
I have not had problems with this (although I am going through my ISP's SMTP
server to send, using my own SMTP server to receive; if you are installing
Exim by the Debian package manager, select "smarthost" from the menu to enable
this function)

(Also, I use multiple email addresses on my computer, although all of them are
my own; I do not host any email for anyone else, although you can just as well
use the same software to host email for other people too.)

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dmos62
Never thought of using a third-party relay SMTP server. That's a great idea.

Gmail has a relay [0][1], but I'm not sure if it's still free now that the G
Suite free tier is gone.

Amazon SES [2] has competitive pricing, or it's free (first 62,000 emails per
month) if you're using EC2 for sending email.

Then there's a bunch of marketing oriented SMTP providers that have free
tiers. E.g. mailjet [3].

[0] [https://kinsta.com/knowledgebase/free-smtp-
server/](https://kinsta.com/knowledgebase/free-smtp-server/)

[1]
[https://support.google.com/a/answer/2956491?hl=en](https://support.google.com/a/answer/2956491?hl=en)

[2] [https://aws.amazon.com/ses/pricing/](https://aws.amazon.com/ses/pricing/)

[3] [https://www.mailjet.com/pricing/](https://www.mailjet.com/pricing/)

~~~
zzo38computer
I meant the ISP's server; it should come with your internet service (at no
extra charge) if they provide a SMTP server.

~~~
dmos62
Yeah, but I don't have a long-term ISP. Anyway, I don't see any disadvantage
in using a non-ISP SMTP relay.

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funkaster
I do this for my personal email, but use AWS SES for sending. So far, no
emails have been flagged/lost.

