For your first point, the key is an IP range that isn’t on a blocklist. Pick a very reputable hosting provider (not AWS/GCP/Azure), who has strict no-spam rules, and check out some spam reports from their ranges. Hetzner I’ve heard is good, digitalocean as well, but your mileage may vary.
For your second point, you live with it. I haven’t found a solution, at least. I’ve never landed in spam for corporate offerings (cloud O365, google workspace or whatever they call it now) or (very rare these days) anyone self-hosting with rspamd or equivalent, just regular personal mail (hotmail, gmail, iCloud, etc). That’s usually pretty easy to detect and work around (“hey I sent you an email” “oh I didn’t get it” “did you check your junk?”) Irritating, but not the end of the world.
I’m going to try hosting from my residential IP sometime this year, now that I have sufficient redundancy in terms of power and networking. I don’t know if I’ll have better or worse luck than with hosting providers’ IP ranges, though.
Bro, I owned a /23 at a colo for over 10 years. Registered my ip space with ARIN, had abuse contacts, setup a mail server on a /27 on a /24 that remained mostly unused outside of dev and test servers (strictly controlled). The mail server was also strictly configured to never emit a single email that wasn’t sent by me. So no forwards, no bounces etc.
Mail server still gets blocked by random domains. Nope. Done with hosting email. Everyone assumes you are spam and won’t accept your mail unless you pay them (to be your mail provider).
How recent is your experience? Did you set up TLS, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, DANE/MTA-STS? That's what makes modern mail secure and deliverable (besides basics like matching reverse DNS). The beauty of Mox is that it tells you what exact DNS records you need to set up and it takes care of the certificates. Once it's done I found I have better internet.nl score than some big companies.
It's a damn shame. At this point it's basically in then favour of large providers to randomly block domains since otherwise hosting your own would be trivial.
Some providers are reputation based now. So you need to send emails and slowly ramp up amount over time. Difficult to do if personal though, as you won't get enough throughput.
For your second point, you live with it. I haven’t found a solution, at least. I’ve never landed in spam for corporate offerings (cloud O365, google workspace or whatever they call it now) or (very rare these days) anyone self-hosting with rspamd or equivalent, just regular personal mail (hotmail, gmail, iCloud, etc). That’s usually pretty easy to detect and work around (“hey I sent you an email” “oh I didn’t get it” “did you check your junk?”) Irritating, but not the end of the world.
I’m going to try hosting from my residential IP sometime this year, now that I have sufficient redundancy in terms of power and networking. I don’t know if I’ll have better or worse luck than with hosting providers’ IP ranges, though.