The Software Scrutiny Journal

The other day I setup a mail server for a new business venture. We require a fair number of addresses, so I decided against a cloud solution. Typically cloud solutions start around $5 per user/month – making it a tad too expensive for an entity that doesn’t generate any revenue yet.

Everything went really smoothly and was able to get the server up in about 2.5 hours. I can guarantee a similar situation for you if you follow tomav’s solution There are a lot of people on Hacker News (and elsewhere) who say that it’s just not worth your time. Honestly, so far, I will have to disagree with that sentiment. Gmail accepted emails from our domain just fine – and it didn’t end up in spam either! Thankfully the Digital Ocean IP that was assigned has a good reputation.

We are about 1 month into this experiment and so far have only hit one roadblock. This roadblock is Fastmail blacklisting my new domain name.

My server logs reported the following

response from Fastmail: <<yourdomain.com>> is too new, temporarily blacklisted.

This is definitely a custom error that Fastmail has baked into their software. There is nothing open source (that I can find), that reports such an error – Google came up dry. The unfortunate solution to this problem is making a support ticket. To my knowledge, only subscribers to Fastmail’s service can do this.

If you make a ticket and ask to be whitelisted, they will whitelist you. The other alternative is to just wait. I’m not sure how long “too new” takes to expire. If you decide to engage in this experiment, please let me know. I would be curious in knowing this duration.