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The “mail is hard” myth

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Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#11

Post by swiley »

roel_v wrote: post #4

It's not 'hard', it's 'a gigantic pain in the ass' which is (in normal word use) one form of 'hard'. Which is why most sane people stopped doing it themselves say 15 years ago. Especially for the few cents you can get professional 3rd party email hosting for. Edit: I also very much like the disingenuity of articles saying 'X isnt' hard! Just execute these 20 commands!' Duh, executing those commands isn't the problem,…

Eh, it used to be pretty bad but the other year the people from the openbsd project wrote a new mail server with a trivially easy to understand config file (I wrote mine from scratch just a couple hours after finding it.)

If you’re already basically competent with the OS you’re using and have a machine with a decent connection that can be used for mail then it actually isn’t hard.

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#12

Post by awinder »

I think I more understood the ethos of where the author was coming from at the end:

“And by all means, we must not push everyone to use Big Mailer Corps“

which is totally fair. For the rest of the article though, it’s pretty clear that the author does admit caveats where any business would have to spend time & money figuring stuff out. And the fact is there is no real cabal of Big Email, it is such a commoditized industry. As a business you pay a pittance to protect downside risks, it’s a no-brainer.

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#13

Post by klingonopera »

Let's see... Postfix, Dovecot, SPF and OpenDKIM on the server-side, each of them with their own config.

Then you've got to set up your domain, and domain headers on your domain host. Oh, DMARC is also another thing.

Then, most ISPs will outright refuse to accept incoming mail from your IP address, since they've basically changed from blacklisting to whitelisting. So you've also got to relay your outgoing mail via your domain host.

And then spam rules. I took the recommended rules from the Debian/Postfix/something-something-sorbs.net website, and I rarely receive email from e.g. eBay, because they've been marked as sending spam. Often happens with gmail addresses, too.

Despite all this... I still run my own mail server, but hotdamn, you're calling this not hard?

EDIT: Oh, and nowdays you've also got to entangle your TLS certificates into the whole process somehow. I managed it, but don't ask me how, I'd need to read up on that.

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#14

Post by Izmaki »

roel_v wrote: post #4

It's not 'hard', it's 'a gigantic pain in the ass' which is (in normal word use) one form of 'hard'. Which is why most sane people stopped doing it themselves say 15 years ago. Especially for the few cents you can get professional 3rd party email hosting for. Edit: I also very much like the disingenuity of articles saying 'X isnt' hard! Just execute these 20 commands!' Duh, executing those commands isn't the problem,…

Your comment is perfet. Let me quote:

"OK, then why is everyone saying it’s hard ? [...]

Another reason is because it used to be hard a long time ago. People got traumatized by how hard it was to not screw up and never reevaluated the situation. Some people today genuinely discourage other people from running their mail server, citing the very real difficulties they faced over a decade ago, far before some of today’s tools even existed."

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#16

Post by skrause »

I think the biggest pain in hosting your own mail server is getting your outbound mail delivered into the mailboxes of the large providers without being marked as spam. Especially if you don't actually send a lot of mail, so you can never really build up a good IP reputation.

That's why I generally recommend a hybrid setup: Host inbound mail completely by yourself so that you have full control, but ship off outbound mail to a trusted relay of a privacy oriented provider. For example https://posteo.de/en doesn't filter any outgoing messages by sender, so you can send mail from your own domains. Your local Postfix can DKIM sign your mail before sending them to Posteo and if you add include:posteo.de to your SPF record all your mail will be DKIM signed, SPF authenticated and coming from a reputable IP, so all your deliverability issues will be gone.

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#17

Post by t0astbread »

zaroth wrote: post #3

To this day none of the mail servers I’ve setup can send to verizon.net. It’s not “hard”, but there are servers who will not accept a single message from you, rDNS, DKIM/SPF be damned. And there’s fuck-all you can do about it.

Half tongue-in-cheek but would you rather give up email than fighting back while it's still not all proprietized?

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#18

Post by notyourday »

People do not run their own mail server for the same reason people ( including the author of that guide ) do not host jquery and bootstrap on their own servers -- it is not that it is hard, it is that not running their own mail server or not hosting their own jquery and bootstrap code is easier.

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#19

Post by leothekim »

roel_v wrote: post #4

It's not 'hard', it's 'a gigantic pain in the ass' which is (in normal word use) one form of 'hard'. Which is why most sane people stopped doing it themselves say 15 years ago. Especially for the few cents you can get professional 3rd party email hosting for. Edit: I also very much like the disingenuity of articles saying 'X isnt' hard! Just execute these 20 commands!' Duh, executing those commands isn't the problem,…

This. Even running your own IRC, while not "hard", is a PITA enough that companies will shell out a chunk of change to have someone else do it for them. And, they may even get better features as a result.

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#20

Post by esotericn »

The thing I've always worried about is that to my knowledge there's no ACK for outbound mail.

The potential impact of one email I send not being received is absolutely enormous to the extent that certain mails I'd pay a decent amount of money to ensure delivery, probably more than an actual postage stamp.

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