It’s been two months since I am running a mail server. I worked on a beautiful UI like SendGrid and MailGun for more than six months. I plan to start a transactional email service.
I bought a range and rented another /24 range because I didn’t want to have a bad neighbour on the subnet. I even got my own ASN because jerks like UCEProtect often put big ISPs on a blacklist at the ASN level.
Of course, I have got a decent experience with this. I wrote my own SMTP server, email routing, and other things such as bounce and suppression handling. In a sense, everything is fine. RDNS, DKIM, DMARC, and SPF.
I know that IP needs to warm up, so that’s where I started. I paid for a few services to help me warm up, and it took me about two months to do so. Okay so far. The email was delivered 100% of the time to Gmail, but not at all to Yahoo and Outlook. The delivery rate to these two companies started to get better around last week, though. Some IP addresses started getting a 100% delivery rate.
Then, I started testing my service on one of my websites. Of course, 100% transactional emails with account confirmation links ONLY. It was working great. Nearly 2,000 emails, 3,000+ opens and about 2,500 clicks daily on an average.
I’ve also subscribed to Glock Apps and MXToolbox to measure my email deliverability and monitor IPs.
Just today, I received an email with all half of my active IP addresses and sending/tracking domain blacklisted by Spamhaus. They categorize it under “spam domain”, but I looked through my server logs (yes, everything is logged) and found no evidence of spam. Only transactional and warmup emails sent. I opened a ticket with Spamhaus and refuse to unblock my IP addresses and domains.
I spent 6 months and $20,000+ working on this, only to be butchered by Spamhaus. I want to kill myself. How can Spamhaus be the police, judge and the executioner?
Spamhaus is the worst for filtering mails, I used to have their DNS based block list as a factor for my incoming mail spa filtering, but they started to say a whole bunch of other mail servers were sending spam.
I had to remove that factor from my incoming mail filters, as it wasn’t effective anyway. (For filtering incoming mail, the filter that seems the most effective at blocking spammers is just sleeping for 2 seconds at the start of a connection, and then blocking any client that has send any bytes to the server, if they haven’t send any bytes, just send the hello message)
Isn’t Spamhaus basically a protection racket, like Yelp and the BBB? Either way, email is messed up, I do everything to avoid having to deal with it myself after having to deal with running a mail server for a while, and things have only gotten worse.
Yeah. This is why I gave up and started using mailgun for both sending and receiving email. I just set up gmail as an inbox