Yeah.

Sadly I think email will be with us for the foreseeable future. It’s broken, sure… but it’s just so fundamental to the web.

An alternative would need to be ubiquitous, and that seems unachievable.

I don’t think the SPF / DKIM / DMARC stuff is overly complex nor the core of the problem.

In my case it was recipients with bonkers microsoft exchange servers that just had weird ideas about who should be sending them emails.

For example, one thing that tripped me up forever ago was grey listing. Apparently the receiving server just wouldn’t acknowledge the sending server for an arbitrary period of time, say 12 hours or so. Spam senders would usually give up long before then, while a legit server would keep trying because it’s legitimately trying to deliver an actual email.

So my email-in-a-box type self hosted set up was fine really. Compliant you might say. But to send emails to this one in a thousand recipient I had to investigate what was going on and reconfigure things to ensure their server would interact with mine.

Another thing that can happen is that spammers just put your email address in the “from” field and fire off a few million emails. Obviously the DKIM signatures and SPF won’t match but it still just makes your future legitimate emails look spammy. Having the credibility of a larger organisation goes a long way in this type of instance.

I’m absolutely in the “don’t self-host email” camp. That said, I think it could be done reliably if you wanted to use someone else’s SMTP server and let them worry about deliverability. As in, have your mx records on your domain route to your MTA and dovecot, but set your DKIM and SPF records to match a third party SMTP server. You could use mxroute as an SMTP server very cheaply. There are others like the email API type services. I still can’t think of why I’d want to self host with all this drama but just an idea I’ve heard.

Indeed.

The whole mess seems to have gotten so much worse.