Self hosted email continues to steeply decline

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Self‑hosted email is perceived as increasingly untenable as spam filtering and deliverability dynamics push individuals and small organizations toward large providers like Google and Microsoft. Commenters describe the technical setup as manageable but argue that opaque reputation systems, IP blacklists, and silent spam filtering make reliable delivery the real barrier, especially for new or low‑volume domains. The thread also touches on broader worries about centralization, privacy, and NSA surveillance, the economics of outsourcing infrastructure and even writing to large platforms and LLMs, and whether decentralization or entirely new protocols are needed to preserve user control over communication.

Centralization & Oligopoly

  • Many see the Google/Microsoft dominance in email as harmful: less competition, more rent-seeking, and greater central control over communication.
  • Others note that these providers are effectively the only reliable way to ensure deliverability, especially to major inboxes.
  • Some argue that decentralization requires individuals and orgs to self-host or use smaller providers, and to help non-technical users move off the big platforms.

Spam, Deliverability, and Reputation

  • Broad agreement that spam and anti-spam systems are the main reason self-hosted email is difficult.
  • Multiple reports: even with SPF, DKIM, DMARC, clean IPs, and no bulk mail, mail to Gmail/Outlook frequently lands in spam or disappears.
  • Others report years or decades of self-hosting with few issues, suggesting IP reputation, provider choice, and long-lived domains matter; some treat occasional blacklisting as an acceptable cost.
  • Several use a hybrid approach: self-host incoming mail, but relay outgoing mail via SES, Fastmail, MailPace, or similar to avoid “memory-holing.”
  • Some claim modern spam levels are manageable with tools like SpamAssassin/Rspamd + DNSRBLs; others still see high false positives or poor filtering.

Ease vs. Risk of Self-hosting

  • Setup with modern stacks (Postfix/Dovecot, Stalwart, Mail-in-a-Box, NixOS modules) is seen as technically straightforward.
  • The hard part is not the software but staying off opaque blacklists, managing reputation, and debugging silent failures.
  • Some give up and move to M365, iCloud, Proton, or Fastmail after clients fail to receive critical messages.
  • Others insist self-hosting is stable and low-maintenance once configured, and push back on narratives that it’s untenable.

LLMs, Writing Quality, and Meta-discussion

  • Many commenters strongly dislike the article’s LLM-written style; some stop reading as soon as they detect it.
  • Arguments that LLM writing is cheap and economically rational are countered by claims it has near-zero intrinsic value and wastes readers’ time.
  • Some worry that widespread LLM use will degrade human communication skills; others see LLMs as useful assistants for drafting or spam filtering.

Alternatives & Futures

  • Some propose abandoning email for new protocols with built-in spam resistance, E2E encryption, and decentralization, but note we’re instead moving into proprietary messaging silos.
  • A few experimental or blockchain-based or custom “new email” proposals are mentioned, but none are mature or widely adopted.