> There have been so many times where I'd send an email and have it never even reach its destination
This is easily explained if you were hosting your own Postfix or something. There are a significant number of hoops that legitimate email senders must jump through in order to ensure their email goes through properly. DKIM signing, SPF records, rDNS, etc. These are some of the ways for gmail and apple identify you as a legit sender as opposed to a spammer.
> I'm not talking about a legitimate message being marked as spam and tucked away in some folder, but not even delivered and my email server isn't notified of this shenanigans
In general, ISPs won't want to let spammers know they're are bulking email. That's why you aren't told.
I suspect that my host's email servers are at least partially to blame for some of these issues. Like a bad egg or two signed up and screwed everyone else over. From what I've gathered Amazon SES is a reliable alternative since they apparently jump through the hoops for you. That might be where I'm turning to for a solution.
It makes sense that they wouldn't notify you if they tanked your email because they think it's "super spam" or something. It is frustrating though. Especially since I'm talking about very low volume emails (not a newsletter or anything). Do you know why some emails are silently dropped while others are marked as junk and allowed to pass through?
> From what I've gathered Amazon SES is a reliable alternative since they apparently jump through the hoops for you. That might be where I'm turning to for a solution.
Yes, definitely... at least for commercial sending. SendGrid, SES, Mailgun, Mailchimp - there are a lot of solutions for outbound commercial / bulk and they're reasonably priced and easy to use. They take care of all of the nuts and bolts.
For personal email, I started seeing this change a long time ago and stopped hosting my own at least ten years ago (around the time 1/2 of my DSL got consumed by spam bandwidth). At this juncture, I keep all of my domains on Gmail.
> Do you know why some emails are silently dropped while others are marked as junk and allowed to pass through?
Probably depends on spam score as to whether it gets bulk foldered or killed immediately, and the ISP.
We've been using SendGrid at $work and I couldn't be happier. It just works, and it's FAST. 3 lines of configuration in the code and we were integrated. Soon I'm going to implement their Events API so we can start doing some detailed analytics.
This is easily explained if you were hosting your own Postfix or something. There are a significant number of hoops that legitimate email senders must jump through in order to ensure their email goes through properly. DKIM signing, SPF records, rDNS, etc. These are some of the ways for gmail and apple identify you as a legit sender as opposed to a spammer.
> I'm not talking about a legitimate message being marked as spam and tucked away in some folder, but not even delivered and my email server isn't notified of this shenanigans
In general, ISPs won't want to let spammers know they're are bulking email. That's why you aren't told.