The key to get high delivery rates to GMail and Office 365 is to setup DMARC. When you have a proper DMARC configuration (and at least SPF) your delivery problems will suddenly go away.
Hosting your own mail server is not rocket science, but you need to have solid sysadmin skills and a good understanding of email as a whole.
If anyone is interested in doing this: Start simple with only Postfix and Dovecot, don't use a database for username/mailbox configuration as most tutorials suggest (start with text files instead). You can also start with OpenSMTPD and Dovecot if you think that Postfix is too complicated.
And if your setup is finally running, make sure to setup proper monitoring (e.g. make sure your mail server is running and answering SMTP connections). You can use free tools like uptimerobot.com for that and get notified before you loose mail.
> Hosting your own mail server is not rocket science, but you need to have solid sysadmin skills and a good understanding of email as a whole.
Not really. I had neither and got it up and running. Sure I had some issues, but as long as you have some competence, most things can be sorted out / figured out.
Hosting your own mail server is not rocket science, but you need to have solid sysadmin skills and a good understanding of email as a whole.
If anyone is interested in doing this: Start simple with only Postfix and Dovecot, don't use a database for username/mailbox configuration as most tutorials suggest (start with text files instead). You can also start with OpenSMTPD and Dovecot if you think that Postfix is too complicated.
And if your setup is finally running, make sure to setup proper monitoring (e.g. make sure your mail server is running and answering SMTP connections). You can use free tools like uptimerobot.com for that and get notified before you loose mail.