Why CardDAV took so long • Hacker News Board

Re: Why CardDAV took so long

#31

Post by atmosx » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 11:10 AM UTC

_urga wrote: post #16

tiffanyh wrote: post #6

I'm going to repost an earlier question I had about FastMail ... It seems like everyone I read loves using FastMail for personal email/calendar/contacts. What I haven't found is many Businesses using FastMail for corporate email/calendar/contacts. Can someone compare FastMail (for business usage) to Office 365 and/or Google Apps? Original question, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10511000

Office 365 at least has several well known bugs: 1. Silently dropping email (no smtp transaction bounce, not in junk, no rules in place) for a specific single sender at a domain, where email from other senders at the same domain is accepted. Hundreds of people have posted about this online with no fix or acknowledgement from Microsoft. 2. Overly strict hardfail SPF policy by default for new customers who have no idea…

Sounds pretty awful choice to me.

Re: Why CardDAV took so long

#32

Post by tankenmate » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 11:18 AM UTC

danieltillett wrote: post #19

oever wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really hard to run you own mail server. Much harder than a web server. This is bad for freedom on the internet. http://www.ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2015/09/15/email.html

It is not that hard to run your own email server, what is hard is to get your mail into recipients mailboxes. The big players in this market have basically decided to block (at random) all mail that doesn't come out of a known email service. I have just given up running my own mail server after more than 15 years because of this problem. Five years ago I had no problems, but these last 12 months have made me decide t…

It's true it is harder; definitely much harder if you're not a sysadmin by trade. These days to get mail to deliver you not only need to support SMTP, but also TLS, SPF, DKIM, DMARC at a minimum. You also need to make sure that you aren't inadvertently a source for relaying, or non delivery report (NDR) / delivery status notification (DSN) bounce source (vis a vis spam with faked return paths etc).

In short if you don't / won't / can't do the above you are indeed much better paying someone else to do it (preferably at scale with attention to detail like fastmail).

Re: Why CardDAV took so long

#33

Post by merb » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 11:42 AM UTC

djsumdog wrote: post #9

hedgehog wrote: post #3

Miserable, this kind of stuff is why I don't run my own mail server any more. Happy Fastmail customer since 2006.

I might go that route myself. I've been running my own email server since 2012 and I'm just tired of having my stuff constantly flagged as spam

use rdns, spf and dkms, luke.

Re: Why CardDAV took so long

#34

Post by danieltillett » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 11:42 AM UTC

tankenmate wrote: post #32

danieltillett wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not that hard to run your own email server, what is hard is to get your mail into recipients mailboxes. The big players in this market have basically decided to block (at random) all mail that doesn't come out of a known email service. I have just given up running my own mail server after more than 15 years because of this problem. Five years ago I had no problems, but these last 12 months have made me decide t…

It's true it is harder; definitely much harder if you're not a sysadmin by trade. These days to get mail to deliver you not only need to support SMTP, but also TLS, SPF, DKIM, DMARC at a minimum. You also need to make sure that you aren't inadvertently a source for relaying, or non delivery report (NDR) / delivery status notification (DSN) bounce source (vis a vis spam with faked return paths etc). In short if you do…

I used to do all these things (not that I am a sysadmin by trade, but after 15 years you get to know the job). Even doing all this the big email players (Microsoft in particular, but Yahoo and Google are also guilty) will just ditch your emails without rhyme or reason if it is not coming out of a known email service.

This didn’t used to happen, but it looks like they have now outsourced their spam filtering to the email service providers who now act as the gatekeepers to email ecosystem - email from a known service == good, email from business that has been around for more than a decade == spam.

Re: Why CardDAV took so long

#35

Post by dest » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 11:45 AM UTC

shocks wrote: post #24

broodbucket wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I configured a pretty simple system (dovecot + opensmtpd) following the guide on the Arch wiki in under an hour, it really wasn't that tricky. I have dodged some common problems, though: - my domain wasn't completely unknown so I had no issues with gmail flagging me as spam - I use my gmail for signing up to things I don't care about mail from, so I have yet to actually receive any spam (at which point I will figure…

Running a mail server is easy, providing a mail service is HARD. Deliverability is really difficult. Being online all the time to make sure you're always recieving email is hard. I was constantly plagued by worry that the important email I sent never actually arrived, or the important email I was waiting for had been sent but I never actually got it.

* Mail you want to receive: Your server can be down for a few days (if I remember correctly, 5 days, according to postfix defaults) and still receive all emails when it goes up again. More downtime and the senders will receive permanent error bounces.

If you fear longer server downtimes, you also have the option of secondary MX servers.

* Mail you send: Just display the mail log (/var/log/mail.info) and see if you get 250 OK responses when you submit messages. What happens next is not your responsibility anymore (except for spam filter rules of course, you need spf, dkim...)

Re: Why CardDAV took so long

#36

Post by brongondwana » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 11:47 AM UTC

zachlatta wrote: post #14

tiffanyh wrote: post #6

I'm going to repost an earlier question I had about FastMail ... It seems like everyone I read loves using FastMail for personal email/calendar/contacts. What I haven't found is many Businesses using FastMail for corporate email/calendar/contacts. Can someone compare FastMail (for business usage) to Office 365 and/or Google Apps? Original question, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10511000

We tried using FastMail for our (small) company, but switched after ~8 months because we started running into deliverability issues and countless issues with shared calendars being unshared (or sometimes losing events). We also couldn't use any of the nice sales tools that integrate with Google Apps (or any of the tools that make managing calendars easier, like https://claralabs.com/ or http://boomerangcalendar.com/…

I'll have to concede the losing sharing. There are still some frustrating things there, the DAV ACL model doesn't map very well to the Cyrus model which is based on IMAP permissions and there were a couple of bad bugs in there until recently. We're still running patches that I'd like to remove, but at least we finally understand the cause of lost acls and fixed it.

I'd love to know more about deliverability issues - that's something we monitor closely, and we want to know if there are any silent blocks/drop rules anywhere that we can't monitor for!

Re: Why CardDAV took so long

#37

Post by noinsight » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 11:51 AM UTC

tankenmate wrote: post #32

danieltillett wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not that hard to run your own email server, what is hard is to get your mail into recipients mailboxes. The big players in this market have basically decided to block (at random) all mail that doesn't come out of a known email service. I have just given up running my own mail server after more than 15 years because of this problem. Five years ago I had no problems, but these last 12 months have made me decide t…

It's true it is harder; definitely much harder if you're not a sysadmin by trade. These days to get mail to deliver you not only need to support SMTP, but also TLS, SPF, DKIM, DMARC at a minimum. You also need to make sure that you aren't inadvertently a source for relaying, or non delivery report (NDR) / delivery status notification (DSN) bounce source (vis a vis spam with faked return paths etc). In short if you do…

I have been running my own email with nothing but a real certificate (maybe that matters) and SPF with no (delivery) issues.

Re: Why CardDAV took so long

#38

Post by brongondwana » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 11:52 AM UTC

mrmondo wrote: post #7

tiffanyh wrote: post #6

I'm going to repost an earlier question I had about FastMail ... It seems like everyone I read loves using FastMail for personal email/calendar/contacts. What I haven't found is many Businesses using FastMail for corporate email/calendar/contacts. Can someone compare FastMail (for business usage) to Office 365 and/or Google Apps? Original question, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10511000

Fastmail is email and calendaring not for cloud based based document editing / file storage.

We do have file storage via WebDAV or ftp, though it's not as full featured as companies that specialise in it. I wrote that up last year as well. It works OK, though it will be nicer one we spec out jmap file storage api.

Re: Why CardDAV took so long

#39

Post by regecks » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 11:53 AM UTC

merb wrote: post #33

djsumdog wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might go that route myself. I've been running my own email server since 2012 and I'm just tired of having my stuff constantly flagged as spam

use rdns, spf and dkms, luke.

... and sign up and monitor every FBL you can get your hands on, have outgoing spam filtering gateways, procedures to rotate subnets in case Microsoft/Outlook/Hotmail receive a single complaint about any message relayed by your MTA and take their sweet time "conditionally mitigating" you. Pray daily that none of your users get their email creds stolen on a coffee shop wi-fi.

It's a very lame part-time job.

Re: Why CardDAV took so long

#40

Post by teekert » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 11:55 AM UTC

danieltillett wrote: post #29

shocks wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever run your own mail server before? edit: I've never spoken to someone who has and says it is 'easy'.

It is easy if you don't care if only half the people you email get your email (i.e. you are a spammer).

I only occasionally had problems with outlook.com, I contacted them, their spam system is an outsourced blackbox. They advised me not to send mass emails... Which I don't of course. Gmail and Apple never gave me any problems. Yahoo banned me after my first mail, no idea why but it seems to work now. I feel like I'm fighting the good fight (decentralize all the things!) so I'll just accept the shortcomings, which are in general, not that many. There are even some nice things like I can have mail addresses that go to both me and my wife, unlimited spam addresses etc.