hi everyone,
I was just about to self-host a Ghost blog but then was warned that my ISP might change my external IP address at any time, so I would need to pay for a static IP address.
Is that true?
(I’d not seen much about that in stuff I’ve looked up so far about self hosting)
Reverse DNS is different than static IP.
But yes for outbound email, if you can’t control reverse DNS you will have pain. (Inbound is totally fine) You can in theory just use whatever hostname the ISP’s reverse DNS resolves to however you will get some spam score (or be rejected) as it doesn’t match your “from” domain.
Outbound email is a huge pain really no matter what. Unless you have a long-term lease on the IP and it isn’t in a bad network you really have to pay someone else if you want reliable delivery.
You can’t assign a PTR record without a static address though. No ISP will do PTR that follows DHCP updates. I haven’t had issues with my leased IPs from my ISP (Through Centurylink). Though a year back I moved and haven’t been able to get a leased IP from my new provider… I have to relay my emails now through a service, that has been a pain in the ass. But now we head into anecdotal nonsense.
And yes, we’re talking about hosting services. We’re in Selfhosted… and the OP is talking about publishing their ghost website… a webserver.
But no, email is otherwise not an issue. I’ve been selfhosting a couple of personal domains for over a decade without issue. I also host several email services for work… no issues outside of some of our clients who want us to use their SMTP servers which apparently suck. But not my issue if their IT fails at managing it.
Edit: DHCP -> PTR auto follow is a thing that exists though… which just makes it sad that ISPs don’t support it. I literally have hostname updates available and used inside of my own network. Just another sad day when pro-sumers are able to implement RFCs (RFC 2136, opnsense pushes updates to my internal DNS servers) better than ISPs.
You don’t need a PTR record though. I just use DKIM and SPF and have no issues.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/4656926/emails-to-@gmail-com-bounce-back-complaining-about
https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1iu0x33/anyone_else_seeing_ptr_record_issues_with_m365/
Yes you do need a ptr. The big services will outright block you.
Google I know for sure does not. They don’t even list it as a requirement. https://support.google.com/a/answer/174124?hl=en
The first link in my previous comment is literally gmail returning an error because no ptr…
Edit: your page is about setting up dkim while using their workspaces. You don’t control their ptrs.
Edit2: notice they don’t talk about SPF or dmarc on that page either. SPF has been require for google as well for a while and dmarc is highly recommended though not strictly required.
From over a year ago. Requirements change.
Your page is explicitly a support page for dkim config. It is not a list of email requirements. YOU don’t control their ptr records. Ptr records are placed on the IP space side. Google controls theirs for workspaces. So that page won’t have help on the matter. Requirements haven’t changed. I control systems that send millions of messages a month…
Ptr, SPF and dkim are now mandated. Dmarc is highly recommended for gmail…
Edit: https://forum.directadmin.com/threads/gmail-rejecting-emails-due-to-missing-or-incorrect-ptr-record-–-how-to-set-this-up-correctly.72802/
https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1foik1l/false_error_message_does_not_have_a_ptr_record/
https://dmarcreport.com/blog/googles-guidelines-to-send-emails-to-gmail-users/
How many links you need before you recognize that you’re wrong? All three of these are from last 10 months. One of which was from March.
I don’t know what to tell you. I’m literally looking at my DNS records at cloudflare that point to my home IP and there is no PTR entry and yet I have dozens of emails in my gmail account about scheduled process and Prometheus alerts etc. The last undeliveryable I got from Gmail was 2 month ago when I was setting up the email server. Maybe because I’m on Google Fiber it’s not enforcing it but I have no PTR record.