Yep, after over a decade of trying to run independent mail servers we finally broke down and switched to SendInBlue and SendGrid last year. Even if you do everything right, it's just not possible to get gmail to reliably deliver mail unless you use one of the big services for smtp. It's really disappointing.
Edit: We can at least keep using our servers for incoming mail, and just use those for sending.
I ran my own email server for many years. It was fun, easy, and gave me a lot of freedom and power. Gmail was never an issue for me, but I put a lot of effort into it. Others have not had such promising results.
For me, it wasn’t Gmail. It was Proofpoint and Microsoft. During a very email-critical time I couldn’t get emails out to certain Proofpoint customers or to Hotmail.com addresses (specifically). And it was important enough for me to switch rather than try to fix.
Microsoft was likely arguably fixable but Proofpoint wanted me to prove ownership and control over the entire IP allotment from which my mail was emanating in order to lift the restriction on my single IP. That wasn’t possible because I didn’t control the entire space my IP was in.
It’s become increasingly difficult to operate email independently without a lot more money and time at the least. This worries me.
No one will do anything because free and independent email is less valuable to the general public than spam free email. HN loves to downplay the existence of abuse on the internet. Gmail isn't dropping your emails as some big evil corporate plan, it's collateral damage in a war on unimaginable amounts of spam.
Pretty sure newsgroups were killed by spam and lack of moderation. I spent a lot of time on them back in the day, and by the time Google got in the game they were already dying. By the time they digested Deja, Usenet was a tiny fraction of original size (if you discard spam).
(Not to mention lack of basic features. I've got a laptop at some point and wanted to synchronize read status between my devices. I ended up writing NNTP to Maildir converter so I can use my IMAP server for this. Not pretty.)
Google continues to hold the pillow over Usenet text newsgroups. Google Groups is by far the largest enabler and gateway of spam onto Usenet and they don't respond to abuse complaints.
And then ironically they're blocking access to some newsgroups (and more annoyingly especially their archives) because they contain too much spam. Gee, thanks for nothing…
For all email. I disagree that marketing email in general is a problem though. Eg. we send a monthly newsletter that is explicitly marketing, but it's opt-in (not opt-out; users need to explicitly choose to receive it), so I'm not sure what the harm is there. And yes, it's easy to unsubscribe too.
Unsolicited marketing email is a problem, and I don't think we send anything that a reasonable person could categorize as that. We send
-replies to user support requests
-new vehicle listing alerts that users have explicitly signed up for (eg by running a search for a car on autotempest and then entering their email address in the "get alerts for this search" field)
-monthly newsletter, again with explicit opt-in only
Users are stupid, they just hit spam because they can't be bothered to unsubscribe or are too dumb to realise it's from someone they have an existing relationship with - people love giving end users the benefit of the doubt but they really don't deserve it.
I don't think so. The post claims there's ways to deal with spam without trusting single authorities to police it.
Additionally, the linked post explains that if you get flagged as spam or "sending to many emails" there's literally no way to fix it without sounding the alarm in a post like this.
Edit: We can at least keep using our servers for incoming mail, and just use those for sending.