This has been going on for at least a decade, I'm not really sure how you can spend half a year and 20k doing something without stumbling upon countless examples of the same behaviour from Spamhaus & Co.

Sorry that this happened to you.

Haha. UCEProtect are biggest cunts who ask for money for whitelisting. We tend to ignore them.

Did you ask spamhaus for headers of email IDs they marked as spam? Or did they give any reason?

Also, who is using your service?

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Spamhaus is the worst for filtering mails, I used to have their DNS based block list as a factor for my incoming mail spa filtering, but they started to say a whole bunch of other mail servers were sending spam.

I had to remove that factor from my incoming mail filters, as it wasn't effective anyway. (For filtering incoming mail, the filter that seems the most effective at blocking spammers is just sleeping for 2 seconds at the start of a connection, and then blocking any client that has send any bytes to the server, if they haven't send any bytes, just send the hello message)

jerks like UCEProtect often put big ISPs on a blacklist at the ASN level.

yea, just ignore them, no one major uses them & even if you do everything right, they still blacklist you, it's such a scam and the guy running it is a major dick nozzle

https://uceprotect.wtf/

i used to run my own and conract theae comoanies every few month. as long as you told them whats up theyd unban.

yes it sucks and it is what it is. they always ban just because your range isnt gmail or isp basically.

I used to manage an Exchange 2000 Server. I don't miss this.

Maybe "transactional email" for you is "renamed spam" for them xD

Gawd I hate what email has become.

What was your goal to achieve here? Investing 20k to send emails doesn't sound like the typical self hoster.

LMAO...🤣

Thank you for your effort put in SMTP. I will keep it away and never try.

I'm with you. I hosted my own mail server for about five years before giving up, and it irritates me when folks say it's not that bad.

Even with perfect DKIM and DMARC configurations, spam filter lists would add me silently and repeatedly, and I'd frequently have to go through their processes to remove my domain. Then Google would sometimes start treating me as spam too, or outright deny email delivery, requiring some tweak or another to enable delivery.

It was a constant battle, one in which you don't always know when you're losing since nobody reaches out to tell you when you've been blocked. It was exhausting.

Giving up and moving to Proton was a sad moment. I really wanted to stay as limited as possible in my dependence on other tech companies, but email just wasn't reasonable for me at all.

One does not simply, setting up Mail Server.