I was running my own mail server for nearly 10 years on Hetzner. Prior to that on other hosts and in the distant past at home. Running mail servers is something I have done professionally and successfully.
The last time I moved boxes as I had many times before. I was on clean IP range but I had no IP reputation at all. In the past this wasn’t such a problem, especially with SPF, DKIM, rDNS, DMARC, server-to-server SSL etc. Around the same time I started having to deal with organisations (legal, etc for a death in the family and later rent) rather my my own circle of friends. It became extremely apparent that my mails weren’t hitting the inbox. But they were being accepted. This was extremely problematic.
I was in the group stating that running your own mail server isn’t hard. I still say that. The hard problem is convincing the big players to let your low volume domains and IPs hit the inbox. I begrudgingly gave up my MX servers last year.
I wonder if there's some sort of relay setup that could be used to mitigate this: e.g. if you want to run your own mail server, sign up for some kind of "mail ring" that transparently proxies the (encrypted) traffic from all the member mailserver administrators. That way, your public IP has a higher volume and more leverage getting delivered.
Integration with SPF and would be unfun and probably even impractical (max 10 lookups iirc?). I’d also worry about the inevitable abuse which would appear to originate from your range(s). If you can mitigate those though, it sounds interesting
I was running my own mail server for nearly 10 years on Hetzner. Prior to that on other hosts and in the distant past at home. Running mail servers is something I have done professionally and successfully.
The last time I moved boxes as I had many times before. I was on clean IP range but I had no IP reputation at all. In the past this wasn’t such a problem, especially with SPF, DKIM, rDNS, DMARC, server-to-server SSL etc. Around the same time I started having to deal with organisations (legal, etc for a death in the family and later rent) rather my my own circle of friends. It became extremely apparent that my mails weren’t hitting the inbox. But they were being accepted. This was extremely problematic.
I was in the group stating that running your own mail server isn’t hard. I still say that. The hard problem is convincing the big players to let your low volume domains and IPs hit the inbox. I begrudgingly gave up my MX servers last year.