Introduction
I run my own mail system on a Linux VPS for all incoming and outgoing email. I’m very experienced with email server administration, and it’s fully set up with modern encryption and authentication methods such as TLS, SPF, DKIM, DMARC. It has everything needed for a mail server to have a great reputation to maximise deliverability.
Nevertheless, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to run an email server, or cluster of email servers, in this age when more and more IP ranges are being placed onto private blacklists which aren’t publicly accessible, and which offer no facility for removal of IPs from the blacklists. My VPS’s IP range is apparently on some internal Microsoft blacklist, and my VPS provider is aware of this problem but seems unable to do anything about it. It has therefore become more or less impossible to get email through to Microsoft-hosted email addresses, despite all my best efforts. The logs show that the emails are being accepted, usually by servers whose names end with “mail.protection.outlook.com”, but after being accepted they are apparently being sent directly to the Microsoft Hotmail and Outlook equivalent of /dev/null.
I’ve therefore had to accept that it’s become necessary to relay outgoing email via a service which can ensure the best possible deliverability, and I’m now using Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) for this purpose. However, SES doesn’t offer a simple way of viewing email logs showing the kind of information you see in logs from MTAs such as Postfix, Sendmail, or Exim, so I had to set something up for that. There are various different solutions for this, but I just wanted something quick and easy which would sit nicely alongside my existing mail logs.
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