I recently read this post by Carlos Fenollosa lamenting the difficulties hosting your own email server. I can understand where he’s coming from and he makes some solid points. So far I’ve been fortunate enough to have avoided being blacklisted with one exception. Proofpoint is the only mail relay that blocks my mail. I’ve tried contacting them 5 times and have given up. Unfortunately they are the relay my current employer uses.

I admit, I had not considered that market forces may be working against private hosting in the way Fenollosa describes. It makes sense though. The practice of blacklisting blocks of addresses indefinitely with no recourse for appeal is the laziest shotgun approach, yet it there is no incentive to do otherwise. Solutions like requiring blacklisting to be temporary don’t seem to have a technical means of enforcement. It would have to mandated by law for the practices to change.

Oh well. I’ve loved the experience and would recommend it to anyone interested in diving into system administration. It’s been a long time since I’ve had such a concentrated effort put into research for its own sake.