I first set a MiaB VM on Amazon, and then eventually moved it to LunaNode.
Both had issues delivering emails, even though both boxes showed all security and DNS settings on the MiaB dashboard “green”
In some cases, emails went to the junk folder or were not delivered at all (sometimes quarantine by O365 recipients)
Seems that getting a reputable public outgoing IP on any public cloud platform is a bit of a challenge.
I would assume that eventually, any IP that I use would be “trusted”, since I won’t be using it for spam, but since I don’t know how long that will take, I’m going the SMTP relay way.
I went and set the MiaB to use SendGrid as an external relay, it was a little better, but on the free account, they seem to be using a pool of IPs shared among people that had previously abused the platform, so some of them are blacklisted on the internet. on SendGrid there is no way to get a clean static IP unless you get tier 2 of their paying accounts ($90/month).
I moved the MiaB from SendGrid to Amazon SES, and it looks much better, but in order to have some free sending credit, you have to put your MiaB inside AWS cloud, which I originally had anyways.
Are there any other good SMTP relays that don’t break the bank, that would have a better reputation with their IPs?
There will be various different users reporting different experiences, so YMMV, but I’ve been using Vultr for years and never an issue inboxing everywhere, at least that anyone has reported. I don’t send many messages to Microsoft hosted domains, but I do have a Hotmail account that in no way is correlated with my hosted mail domains or mail server, and everything goes right to the inbox on the first try.
I use AWS SES to relay. It’s charged on volume and its very cheap. So unless you are mass mailing it won’t cost much. It used to cost me around £1-2 per month for a pretty busy server.
My server is only used by me and a few friends/family now and it costs £0.00-£0.02 per month.
I have a meager volume, maybe 300 emails /mo, and I have set up other people’s instances of MiB. What I have done is use AWS or DigitalOcean for AWS. I will get elastic IPs until I find one that doesn’t have a bad reputation. For DigitalOcean, the process has been very similar but just firing up servers till I get a good IP.
This method might be a ridiculous way to run things, but it has resulted in an excellent MiB experience for everyone I’ve worked with in setting up MiB.
Its been a while, I just want to provide an update.
After using SendGrid with no so good results, I moved to Amazon SES, it was better but they also give you an IP from a pool that some other people might be misusing, therefore its reputation is not as good.
I went back to use whatever IP Lunanode was giving me, and after a few weeks it was automatically removed from whatever spam list it was before, and now I get great deliverability. All my emails are getting to gmail.comlive.com outlook,com, aol.com, private domains, etc.
I would say my conclusion would be “try to stick with the IP your VPS provider gives you, deploy with enough time in advance, and be patient”
Yes, indeed. I have recommended Lunanode as I have found their IP ranges to be good. Of course, any new IP needs time to be warmed up, so it is not uncommon for providers to reject emails coming from a brand new mail server. Another thing to be aware of is that many providers score brand new domains negatively. Google for instance will spam most brand new domains, sometimes offering relief to those who have signed up for Google Postmaster Tools – but not always. Usually after 30 days Google will allow you to hit the inbox.