alt Hacker NewsEmail deliverability is the reason I gave up on email entirely for my side project and built on Telegram instead. Setting up SPF, DKIM, DMARC, warming up a domain, monitoring reputation, dealing with bounces and complaints... all of that just to maybe land in someone's inbox.
With Telegram you send a message via the Bot API and it arrives. 100% deliverability. No spam filters. No authentication chain. The message just shows up with a notification on their phone.
Obviously Telegram has its own limitations (smaller user base in the US, less formal). But for anything where you need reliable message delivery to people who opted in, messaging platforms have a massive advantage over email in 2026.
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Most of that can be mitigated, or at least centrally managed, using an ESP like Mailgun or Sendgrid.
It is a pain in the ass though, coming from someone that had to dig their domain out of "low" reputation with Google Postmaster.
Some of us selfhost email, like me for 30+ years, and have 100% deliverability.
Until the platform owner bans for whatever reason and if communication by way of the platform was your only means of communication with your customer base, that's the platform owner having the power to destroy your business. No different that businesses that rely on the neverending goodwill of the mobile app store owners. One misstep and your business is gone with no recourse whatsoever. Protocols > Platforms. Always.
Unless you are running a more complex setup SPF, DKIM and DMARC really aren't that complicated. They are annoying and additional checkboxes you have to go trough that are hard to fully automate because they require access to DNS, but they are more busywork than difficult.
Domain and IP reputation and all the other quirks of deliverability are much more of a headache. DMARC is setup, test and done. But deliverability in praxis is something you cannot just test and can break at any time. The second worst are email providers that do whitelisting for email and require you to go through their process to even be allowed to send emails to their customers. The worst are providers that randomly decide to drop your emails without informing you or giving you a proper way to appeal as a small sender. If you're not a large email provider they have no problem just dropping you and the fault is on you because your service is the only one that is not working.
And then there are so many more intricacies of the ancient email protocol. Compatibility with horrendously outdated and misconfigured mail infrastructure is particular frustrating to me. I'm running a modern, properly configured, state of the art email server, but get ghosted by large email providers, yet have to deal with the broken mess, much bigger providers than myself are, which of course have no trouble delivering their broken spoofable email just because they are large enough.