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Ask HN: The middle ground for email self-hosting?

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Re: Ask HN: The middle ground for email self-hosting?

#81

Post by capableweb »

noduerme wrote: post #72
capableweb wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only issue is that emails don't come in instantly. They can take up to 15 minutes. I consider this a feature, but it would be really annoying to some. I have a somewhat similar setup, slightly different. Most emails arrive within 10-15 seconds, but sometimes gets stuck somewhere along the line (as it happens with emails), which is normally not a problem. But some platforms force you to use the "send link to log…

This is called "greylisting" and it's fairly normal if you don't run your own server. Someone triggers a spam block and gets put on a partial time-out. Then the more times they try to re-send an email to you, the longer their emails get kept in limbo. If you don't control the server, you don't have independent email.

Well, could be that, could be other things as well. Could be the sender who have implemented their email sending via a queue, and currently they are overloaded. Could be their email sending server/service who is behind and having delivery problems. Could be numerous things thanks to the nature of email.

In the end, the UX of having to wait for an email sucks, sometimes.

Re: Ask HN: The middle ground for email self-hosting?

#82

Post by quickthrower2 »

noduerme wrote: post #64

I'm going to write this assuming you're a non-technical professional, lawyer perhaps, looking for a private email solution that doesn't rely on third parties. Bottom line: There's no "middle ground", any middle ground you cede is allowing a third party some kind of access. Hosting your own email has become expensive and time-consuming (although IMHO it's still extremely worthwhile, and I do it in spite of what a pain…

That is a lot of money and surely few can afford it for their email. What are the advantages of it that make it worth the time and effort. Is it security? privacy? or just trying to keep things a bit more decentralised?

Re: Ask HN: The middle ground for email self-hosting?

#83

Post by quickthrower2 »

superasn wrote: post #71

I think your best bet is Amazon ses. In my recent testing, all mail always go through - unless the recipient marks it thus. It's damn cheap too, like almost free for low volumes. I think Amazon uses this for their workmail also and has become pretty strict at policing abuse. I am only speaking for gmail though, so ymmv for hotmail et al which I haven't checked.

I agree. Amazingly cheap. Worth a little bit more technical hassle (looking at templating and batching for example IIRC you had to do for marketing or bulk transactional emails) but still amazing value for money.

Re: Ask HN: The middle ground for email self-hosting?

#84

Post by noduerme »

capableweb wrote: post #81
noduerme wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is called "greylisting" and it's fairly normal if you don't run your own server. Someone triggers a spam block and gets put on a partial time-out. Then the more times they try to re-send an email to you, the longer their emails get kept in limbo. If you don't control the server, you don't have independent email.

Well, could be that, could be other things as well. Could be the sender who have implemented their email sending via a queue, and currently they are overloaded. Could be their email sending server/service who is behind and having delivery problems. Could be numerous things thanks to the nature of email. In the end, the UX of having to wait for an email sucks, sometimes.

True. The outbound queuing thing is going away, though. A lot of banks and service companies used to wait until a regular 2, 3 or 5 minute mark (00:00, 00:02) to send those verification emails in batch. In the past year or so there's been a move away from that it seems. The initial reason for batching them was to prevent spammers from triggering hordes of emails somehow off their system by gaming the "submit" button for a form, but now there's other security in place and the emails are being sent out faster. Generally, once an email is sent, it's almost instantaneously received if the recipient isn't delaying or blocking it. 99% of the time when I hear from clients who are waiting for an email, it either came in right away and bounced because our spam filters were too tight, or our own greylisting kicked in and slowed it down.

Re: Ask HN: The middle ground for email self-hosting?

#85

Post by cubesnooper »

noduerme wrote: post #80
cubesnooper wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You need a dedicated box, not a VPS. … Unlike some people are saying, you should never do this off a VPS if you have an interest in keeping the email secure and functioning for a long time. I agree that hosting a mail server directly on a VPS compromises privacy and control. But there’s a better alternative: use VPSes for cheap static IPs, while hosting the server locally on hardware you physically control, using W…

That's a cool idea I'd never considered. And it's easy to set up. But then the main thing you're getting out of the VPS is the static IP. The main reason I was advising against VPS's, besides obvious vulnerabilities, was that their IP blocks get banned all the time. If you want to run a mailserver for a long time you need to cultivate that IP address's reputation for years, and you don't want it to be anywhere sketch…

> the main thing you're getting out of the VPS is the static IP.

Yes, that and RDNS.

> If you're paying for that, why not just pay for a static IP at home?

That’s a good question. I too hear that mail providers consider IP blocks assigned to VPS providers less trustworthy than others. The reasons I don’t take the ISP/dedicated server route, aside from price, are:

• VPS providers are not tied to my physical location. If I move, I probably can’t take my ISP’s static IP with me (I may even move to somewhere they don’t service). Conversely, if I want to switch away from a local ISP, the selection of alternatives is extremely limited.

• Risk of neighboring IPs reducing the reputation of the block exists with server companies and local ISPs as well. I concede that the problem is probably worse with VPSes, but I hope to mitigate it somewhat by avoiding bottom‐of‐the‐barrel providers and by the fact that my own IP will never be used to spam.

• I’m somewhat worried about the possibility of DDOS, and VPS companies provide a lot of cheap bandwidth, so in case of attack I might be able to salvage the situation with careful firewalling on the VPS.

Re: Ask HN: The middle ground for email self-hosting?

#86

Post by laurent123456 »

nottorp wrote: post #47
laurent123456 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since he uses his own domain, he can move elsewhere if there's a problem with Google. I do that too, and it's indeed much simpler than self-hosting.

It sounded like he's actually keeping the emails on google, even though they come on a custom domain. And that doesn't seem safe to me.

For backup he could get Thunderbird or similar to fetch the emails are regular interval. I think it's generally a good idea to do so.

Re: Ask HN: The middle ground for email self-hosting?

#87

Post by noduerme »

cubesnooper wrote: post #85
noduerme wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a cool idea I'd never considered. And it's easy to set up. But then the main thing you're getting out of the VPS is the static IP. The main reason I was advising against VPS's, besides obvious vulnerabilities, was that their IP blocks get banned all the time. If you want to run a mailserver for a long time you need to cultivate that IP address's reputation for years, and you don't want it to be anywhere sketch…

> the main thing you're getting out of the VPS is the static IP. Yes, that and RDNS. > If you're paying for that, why not just pay for a static IP at home? That’s a good question. I too hear that mail providers consider IP blocks assigned to VPS providers less trustworthy than others. The reasons I don’t take the ISP/dedicated server route, aside from price, are: • VPS providers are not tied to my physical location.…

That all makes sense. Although in my experience, if you're really being careful about not sending spam, you've got a lot more to worry about from your VPS being blacklisted than your own IP personally.

>> I’m somewhat worried about the possibility of DDOS

The one time I got severely dDoS'd, because I'd let a friend run a tiny static website off my server that attracted that kind of attention, the hosting company I was with shut my account down immediately and asked for $5000 in reparations. I had to backdoor into the server and salvage whatever I could. That was a hardened box in a military grade facility. I don't think a VPS is going to be kind. Push comes to shove, if it's in your house you can pull the cable.

Re: Ask HN: The middle ground for email self-hosting?

#89

Post by layer8 »

noduerme wrote: post #64

I'm going to write this assuming you're a non-technical professional, lawyer perhaps, looking for a private email solution that doesn't rely on third parties. Bottom line: There's no "middle ground", any middle ground you cede is allowing a third party some kind of access. Hosting your own email has become expensive and time-consuming (although IMHO it's still extremely worthwhile, and I do it in spite of what a pain…

> Be prepared to spend at least $50/mo and at least 6 hours in setup and 1-2 hours a month debugging if you do it personally. […] Unlike some people are saying, you should never do this off a VPS if you have an interest in keeping the email secure and functioning for a long time.

That’s simply not true in that generality. I run my mail server on a VPS costing ~$7 per month (have been for ~20 years, switching the VPS provider once in that time) and mostly only have to do something when I major-upgrade Debian every 2-3 years. (Security updates are automated.) Some of my friends do the same. For the initial setup I would plan for more than 6 hours, it can certainly take some effort to work through all the details.

Re: Ask HN: The middle ground for email self-hosting?

#90

Post by LinuxBender »

zahllos wrote: post #65
defanor wrote: post #35

A major theme in self-hosted email discussions is deliverability issues (particularly to larger email service providers), and I tend to be unsure how bad it actually is: sometimes it does seem pretty bad, other times it sounds like it's fine, and possibly the chatter about failed deliveries is caused by misconfigured servers and/or misunderstandings. Seems like it shouldn't be hard to check and collect reference stat…

I can only contribute my own experience. I have a dedicated server with an IP address in a datacentre, with approx 6 users using my email server for their primary email. DKIM/DMARC/SPF all configured correctly. I also have policies that suspend logins for accounts if they send too much in a certain timeframe, because this is a pretty good indicator of account compromise. The limits would never be hit by humans. I've…

The third was yahoo. For reasons known only to them

I had to work around them for some datacenter mail relays. The only solution I found was to sum up the number of mail relays behind a SNAT and then apply rate limits for their domain to not exceed 6 concurrent connections total per SNAT. To your point and AFAIK they do not document this anywhere.

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