the email rabbit hole

started with a simple thought: i should have an @yuldshah.com email instead of a gmail. how hard can it be.

very. not the software — there's tons of open source, stalwart and mailcow and mail-in-a-box, all solid. the hard part is that when you send email, nobody trusts you. gmail looks at a fresh server ip, especially a cloud ip, and goes "spam, next." you need spf and dkim and dmarc and reverse dns and weeks of slowly warming up an ip while you basically beg google to believe you're a real person.

and half the cloud providers block port 25 outright because spammers ruined it for everyone. so even if you do everything perfectly, you might just... not be allowed to send.

the lesson: receiving email is easy, sending it is a reputation game you can't win with code alone. you rent trust. it's why even people who self-host everything still relay their outbound through someone else. i respect the grind. i will not be doing the grind.