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Why CardDAV took so long

blog.fastmail.com

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Re: Why CardDAV took so long

#41

Post by vbezhenar »

oever wrote: post #11
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.

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

I'm running my mail server and it's not that hard IMO. There are a lot of guides, standards are easy to understand. I can't say how much one would devote to setup his server, probably few hours should be enough.

Gmail marks my mail as spam, for new recipients, though. I don't care, every gmail user usually checks his spam anyway and when I do care, I'll call person to ensure he got my mail, regardless whether I use gmail or my server.

Re: Why CardDAV took so long

#42

Post by bad_user »

danieltillett wrote: post #34
tankenmate wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 em…

The irony is that nowadays most spam I get is from @gmail or @yahoo addresses, so all they've accomplished is lock-in.

Re: Why CardDAV took so long

#43

Post by shocks »

hdabrows wrote: post #26
shocks wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

SMTP requires the sender to retry delivery if the destination is unreachable. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5321#section-4.5.4.1

Just because it's in the RFC does not mean it will be obeyed.

I tried running postgrey - a system that rejects senders it doesn't recognise, tells them to "try again in a minute", and accepts the second email. The theory being that spammers rarely check for these responses because they operate on a "fire and forget" basis. In reality it didn't work because lots of email services didn't correctly respond to the "try again in a minute" response - which is in the RFC!

Maybe it's an extreme example. You expect an SMTP server not to be up all the time, you don't expect them to randomly reject mail and ask you to try again later, but you get my point. It just adds to the stress/worry. I found myself default to Gmail a lot of the time for this reason.

Re: Why CardDAV took so long

#44

Post by shocks »

dest wrote: post #35
shocks wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ge…

Great, now I've got to run TWO mail servers. That'll decrease my anxiety levels. ;D

Re: Why CardDAV took so long

#45

Post by akerro »

vbezhenar wrote: post #41
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

I'm running my mail server and it's not that hard IMO. There are a lot of guides, standards are easy to understand. I can't say how much one would devote to setup his server, probably few hours should be enough. Gmail marks my mail as spam, for new recipients, though. I don't care, every gmail user usually checks his spam anyway and when I do care, I'll call person to ensure he got my mail, regardless whether I use g…

>I don't care, every gmail user usually checks his spam

So you need to start a business where every hour waiting for a response means money lose for you.

Re: Why CardDAV took so long

#46

Post by akerro »

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.

I configured my server once, over two years ago. I logged in on root once again, when I run out of disk space, I made a cron job to remove oldest logs monthly. It's centos6 and it works. Should I care more about it? Anything I should pay attention to?

Re: Why CardDAV took so long

#48

Post by masnick »

zenpusher wrote: post #47

I've had some deliverability issues with Fastmail, and the search feature is horrible. Other than that, I've been a satisfied customer for over a year now.

I've actually found the search in the web interface to be very fast and pretty good in terms of finding what I'm looking for with >70k messages.

When I switched from Gmail a few years ago (https://masnick.org/2013/07/19/fastmail/), one of the most striking changes was how fast FastMail's interface was compared to Gmail. FastMail did a huge update to their search code just as I switched, and I haven't looked back.

Re: Why CardDAV took so long

#49

Post by Khao »

sz4kerto wrote: post #5

"Only this one user had problem. But he had pretty bad problems, and I wanted to fix this properly." That's why I'm a Fastmail customer.

I submitted a bug report once and it was fixed the next day, I was invited to try it out on their beta version of the website and it was rolled out on all the servers a couple days later. These guys are truly providing a fantastic service.

Re: Why CardDAV took so long

#50

Post by merb »

regecks wrote: post #39
merb wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

you won't got onto a FBL if you are the only sender.
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