Not that 250 a year is going to break the bank or something but just

for mail, its silly to pay that much.

I gave up on the rat race of trying to host my own email, for the most part.
For $5/mo I let fastmail handle it. No more stupid delivery problems and their spam filter seems to be decent. Not as secure as, say, protonmail or runbox or those folks, but my use case doesn't call for it, and they are relatively not-evil for the most part.

I still host email for 1 domain on a $4.60/mo hetzner VPS. I use that for text-only email lists and to communicate with folks that also run their own email server. Anybody who sends me MIME-anything there gets plonked. Delivery to gmail or M365 doesn't work, but I don't really care. Same VPS also hosts websites, gemini, asterisk nonsense.

A pox on the house of google for holding the world's email hostage.

BUT...! Tonight I put the finishing touches on the DKIM signer for Citadel, and it's in-production here on Uncensored now. I've got our DKIM record in place, and unless it barfs I'll be updating our DMARC record to match it tomorrow.

And if I do say so myself, I believe I've written the absolutely finest DKIM implementation in the world. I really mean it. It is sooooooo easy for the administrator to work with. If you don't have a signing key, it generates one automatically and saves it in the config database. Whenever changes are made to your domain name configuration (add or remove email domains) or if you change the key for some reason, it automatically posts an Aide message telling you exactly what DNS TXT records to create.

Funny thing ... about a month ago I jokingly said that Citadel version 1000 would have to be something really special ... and here we are.

I don't want to overstate it, but for me the effect of adding DKIM signatures to outbound email was clear and immediate. Gmail in particular stopped rejecting our emails within about 12 hours.

I used to think that the big requirements were RDNS, SPF, and maybe DMARC, and that DKIM was just a nice-to-have, particularly if you were a popular domain and people liked to spoof you. Apparently I was wrong: DKIM is now pretty much a requirement if you want to get your mail out to people whose inboxes are on the big sites.

I'd like to write an easy-to-follow guide on how to self host your email and live to tell the tale. Obviously it would be Citadel-centric but I want to get the message out there that ... in the words of Leah Bolden ... "You can do this!"