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Date: Tue, 21 Dec 2021 15:54:14 -0800
Message-Id: <CGLDV4NDVMOT.MW10264ZUODJ@thonker>
To: <~sircmpwn/sr.ht-discuss@lists.sr.ht>
Subject: Self hosted email spam
From: "Kalyan Sriram" <kalyan@coderkalyan.com>

Hello all,
For the past year, I've been self hosting email (using postfix + dovecot
on a Vultr VPS) - both as an educational exercise and a chance to get
away from Google - which is tied to my domain, coderkalyan.com. However,
when I first set it up, I was unable to get GMail to not put me in spam,
so I decided to go with Amazon SES as an SMTP proxy so I could rest
assured my email was being delivered.

Recently, I came across the [maddy](https://maddy.email) email client
and have been using it for the past couple of weeks. I decided that
since I had to rip out my existing DNS configuration and redo it, I'd
take the opportunity to try to remove AWS from my workflow However,
despite multiple days of googling and trying, I'm unable to get gmail to
accept my messages into primary inbox. Even with all the usual anti-spam
measures implemented, they put me in spam (which is slightly better than
not receiving it at all, which is what they do if you don't have
everything set up). What I've tried so far:

* DKIM and DMARC set up
* SPF records
* configured reverse DNS through Vultr and it seems to be working
* google site verification TXT record
* TLSA/DANE record
* MTA-STS record and subdomain setup (mta-sts.coderkalyan.com)
* 10/10 score on https://mail-tester.com
* high scores on other mail testing platforms, in fact the only issue
I've seen is that I don't fill out a lists unsubscribe header (which
doesn't seem sensible for a private email server).
* I've tried to use Google Postmaster tools and other reputation sites
but apparently postmaster doesn't even bother to look at your domain
until you meet a certain email throughput, which is designed for
businesses sending to large mailing lists so I'll never meet that.

I suspect I'm not the only person on this mailing list who self-hosts,
so I thought I'd reach out to see if anyone could help me out. Correct
me if I'm wrong, not sure how exactly mailing lists are implemented, but
I assume lists.sr.ht itself needs to pass some sort of spam checks to
get delivered to GMail inboxes (and for the most part I haven't seen
issues with that in the past).

Any advice would be much appreciated. Please do not suggest that I move
to a hosted provider or use an SMTP proxy. I realize that these exist
(even ethical ones like Migadu) and do not need others to tell me that.
I will move back to an SMTP proxy if all else fails, but I'm interested
in solving this problem directly.

Thanks,
Kalyan Sriram