I haven’t quite given up yet, but it may very well happen at some point. Like the author, I’ve done everything you’re supposed to do, and a non-trivial percentage of emails from my domain still get rejected or go to spam. I’ve started sending from a gmail address when something really has to go through. I planned to make my own domain’s email address my permanent one, and it’s sad to think of that becoming impossible.
(to be clear, I’m facing a slightly easier problem than the author; my emails are being sent out from a bluehost email server, not a truly self-hosted one — and it’s still an absolute nightmare trying to keep emails going through.)
Many companies have been trying to disrupt email by making it proprietary. So far, they have failed. Email keeps being an open protocol. Hurray?
No hurray. Email is not distributed anymore. You just cannot create another first-class node of this network.
Email is now an oligopoly, a service gatekept by a few big companies which does not follow the principles of net neutrality.
I have been self-hosting my email since I got my first broadband connection at home in 1999. I absolutely loved having a personal web+email server at home, paid extra for a static IP and a real router so people could connect from the outside. I felt like a first-class citizen of the Internet and I learned so much.
Over time I realized that residential IP blocks were banned on most servers. I moved my email server to a VPS. No luck. I quickly understood that self-hosting email was a lost cause. Nevertheless, I have been fighting back out of pure spite, obstinacy, and activism. In other words, because it was the right thing to do.
But my emails are just not delivered anymore. I might as well not have an email server.
So, starting today, the MX records of my personal domain no longer point to the IP of my personal server. They now point to one of the Big Email Providers.
I lost. We lost. One cannot reliably deploy independent email servers.