So You Think You’re a Mail Boss?

You’ve got your own server. Running OpenBSD. smtpd tuned to perfection, spamd trained like a beast. SPF, DKIM, DMARC straight out of a fairy tale. Millisecond response times, almost zero load. Everything’s smooth. You’re the boss.

Then you send an email to Gmail.

Spam.

You try Outlook.

Spam.

Yahoo?

Spam.

Alright. You dig into it. Try to analyze. DMARC policy is clean. DKIM signatures check out. SPF is flawless. Server is pristine, never touched a blacklist. But Gmail doesn’t give a damn. Neither does Outlook. Yahoo? Same story.

Because you’re nobody. A king Nothing.

That’s why.

If you’re not moving corporate money, you’re in the spam folder. Period. You can buy their "business" plan. You can jump on one leg and sing the anthem. You can contact support, but the AI bot will just smile at you.

They're doing it on purpose to force people to use their own email services. No matter what anyone says, it's just a dark pattern to monopolize email communication. Fuck that.

So you shut down your SMTP server. Switch to Proton, 'cause that’s enough for your project. Keep your personal stuff on Gmail—twenty years of history ain’t moving anywhere.

Your mail server? R.I.P. Nice exercise :D

But hey, at least you tried. And now you know how the world works.