> If anyone actually knows the secret to not having your own mail-server's mail go to spam on these bigger systems, please tell, I've Googled it for years with no success.
I've been running my own mail server without sending problems for almost a decade. Right from the beginning, I had a clue and knew that sending SMTP directly from a subscriber IP address was going to be a nonstarter. Such IP's have a negative reputation due to abuse. Instead, from the beginning, I used my ISP's (big ISP in Canada) SMTP forwarding host, configuring my SMTP server to log into that server with my credentials.
(I had a couple of hiccups along the way with the ISP's SMTP service, and they wouldn't help me unless I reproduced the issue with a supported e-mail client. Naturally, an Exim server running on Debian isn't a supported e-mail client, because it's name doesn't sound like "Microsoft Outlook" or "Mozilla Thunderbird").
Anyway, the main advantage of running your own mail server is not the ability to send SMTP directly to someone's MX server, but rather that you have your own MX domain for receiving mail, via a machine you control. Your setup isn't "lesser" in any way just because you're sending through a more reputable SMTP forwarding host.
So your recommendation to having your mail not go directly to spam is to run it for a decade? Got it! :-)
I run a mail server for a few thousand users that has been going for ~20 years, and have regularly had to spend significant time figuring out adjustments the big mail providers make along the way. Spending a day roughly every year figuring out and implementing countermeasures isn't that bad, when you get paid for it. But I really don't have the time to do it for my personal e-mail.
Your answer reminds me of something I heard a greenskeeper say about the big garden he maintains, I think in the UK: Tourists come to me all the time and ask "How can I get my lawn to look like this?" I reply: "The secret is to roll the dew off the lawn every morning." "That's it?" "Just do that for 300 years and your lawn will look like this."
If you have to do it for your personal mail compared to a few thousand users, the problems will obviously be fewer, because you don't send to as many different destinations as a crew of a few thousand users.
> "Just do that for 300 years and your lawn will look like this."
My point is that I've never had problems in that decade, not that it took a decade to fix. I think on two or three occasions, mail to a gmail user mysteriously bounced, but it went away on re-try.
I understood the reputation problem from the beginning instead of banging my head against it. Why I understood that is because I did some research into running mail servers before diving into it.
And my point, not to belabor it, is that reputation seems to be a pretty big deal these days, and your experience running a mail server with a decade of reputation may be different than the experience someone has setting up an e-mail server today. :-)
I've been running my own mail server without sending problems for almost a decade. Right from the beginning, I had a clue and knew that sending SMTP directly from a subscriber IP address was going to be a nonstarter. Such IP's have a negative reputation due to abuse. Instead, from the beginning, I used my ISP's (big ISP in Canada) SMTP forwarding host, configuring my SMTP server to log into that server with my credentials.
(I had a couple of hiccups along the way with the ISP's SMTP service, and they wouldn't help me unless I reproduced the issue with a supported e-mail client. Naturally, an Exim server running on Debian isn't a supported e-mail client, because it's name doesn't sound like "Microsoft Outlook" or "Mozilla Thunderbird").
Anyway, the main advantage of running your own mail server is not the ability to send SMTP directly to someone's MX server, but rather that you have your own MX domain for receiving mail, via a machine you control. Your setup isn't "lesser" in any way just because you're sending through a more reputable SMTP forwarding host.