Is Gmail killing independent email?

Sun, 30 Apr 2023 3:46:00 Dan

People report that self-hosted emails always end up in Gmail spam. Is there anything Google can do about it?

You've probably seen it on Reddit or Hacker News: People complaining that their self-hosted emails always end up in the spam folder of Gmail - even if they set up everything correctly. The question being asked: Is Gmail killing independent email?

Email works with everyone

Email is a great protocol as it basically works with everyone. Since the early days of the internet, people are able to send and receive messages via email to and from any email server. Later on email services like Hotmail - now Outlook, Yahoo and Gmail joined the party so that people and businesses could just create an email address with these services - instead of hosting their own email server. This made email the most widely used communication tool worldwide - and it still is

The use of email services made things incredibly convenient because the services took care of setting up the servers, including setting up SPF, DKIM and DMARC records to make sure the email is being received by other email providers.

Regardless, to this day it is possible to host your own mail server, and lots of companies do so. However, it seems that even if you get SPF, DKIM etc. right, Gmail does not like it when you send emails from your own mail servers.

More at https://tutanota.com/blog/posts/gmail-independent-email

About the author

Dan

Dan

 

I'm a long-time user and enthusiast of open source software and espouse the philosophy that software code should be open (readable). So that everyone can see what happens behind the scenes while we use our electronic devices every day.