Thoughts, tutorials, and insights from the trenches.
Every DNS zone I inherit has a handful of records nobody can explain and is missing one or two that actually matter. Here is the short list I check first.
The mail server software is the absolute easy part. The reason self-hosted email ends up in spam folders almost always comes down to four specific DNS records and a sending reputation that takes actual time to build.
A practical rundown of the control panels I've actually deployed on client servers, what each one is good at, and where it falls short.