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The “mail is hard” myth

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Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#81

Post by scarface74 »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #36

Everything is easy to folks that have the time to grok the tech. I like to write software. I don't like running a Linux server, although I know that i could learn to be an excellent admin. It's just that every second I spend learning Linux admin, is a second I'm not spending learning Swift. So I just use shared hosting for my sites; even though I'm perfectly capable of running a VPS.

To add to your point, I like writing software, I know how to set up networks, load balancers, VMs, databases, messaging servers, etc. I have no interest in doing it or being on call. I mercilessly recommend managed alternatives anytime I can. I have a manager who was glad to kill our SFTP server and pay more money for AWS’s managed solution.

He would much rather hand his boss - the founder - a bill than have to explain why our server went down.

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#82

Post by notyourday »

wolco wrote: post #51
notyourday wrote: post #18

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.

Most people drop jquery locally on the server in a js folder. It's probably the easiest part of the project.

Yet the author of the blog post did not do it, which is a point. It is not about what is 'hard' or what is 'easy'. Rather it is about what is easiest.

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#84

Post by xienze »

danShumway wrote: post #73
xienze wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most domains accept mail from you. And this is precisely why I don’t think it’s worth it. I don’t want to have to worry that “most” domains will accept my mail, I want a big email service that has the clout to force domains to accept my mail. I shouldn’t have to solve the mystery of why my mail was rejected (or rather, why some provider thinks I’m sending spam). That’s why I do Fastmail.

What do you use for automated messages (ie, login emails, password resets)? I asked Fastmail support, and they basically said, "we're not really built for that." However, most of the other services I looked at had arduous terms (arbitration agreements), and even they were talking about delivery rates in ranges of 85-95%. My takeaway has been that as an app creator, email is really unreliable, and I should try wheneve…

Sorry, to be clear I was talking about personal email. But as another poster said, there are plenty of services that provide transactional email.

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#85

Post by jcranmer »

brianpgordon wrote: post #74
akerl_ wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article handwaves this by pointing out that it’s “proof-of-work”. Which is a fancy way of saying “it requires a bunch of work, continuously as the rules change over time”. Which is why I’d consider it “hard” to run my own mail server. The complexity of running a daemon with a config file isn’t the issue, nor is it that any individual task of SPF/DKIM/etc is complex. It’s that I generally want to put 0% of my time…

It would be nice if these big mail services accepted actual proof of work as a way to guarantee that your mail gets through. Maybe someone could extend SMTP with a bitcoin-like challenge where the server sends the client a nonce and a difficulty factor, and the client has to reply with a suffix that you can append to the nonce so that the whole string hashes to something with the corresponding number of zeroes at the…

> People sending personal emails will be happy to burn a penny of CPU time as "postage" but spammers won't be able to send their spam profitably

The problem with this idea is that spammers don't use their own computer, they borrow other people's computers to send the spam. It also heavily penalizes people who legitimately need to send bulk email.

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#86

Post by simpss »

klingonopera wrote: post #30
andrerm wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Postifx is not just one thing, it's: smtp, smtps, submission, relay etc... And Dovecot: pop3, pop3s, imap, imaps, lmtp, passdb, userdb, sql, ldap, seive etc. Look, I don't want Google changing this tomorrow because to something tied to and controlled by them because they don't do evel, isn't faster or people like it, but please, don't say it's not hard because you will be misleading people for sure Edit: to be cr…

Yes... and ooof! And then there's also the password/username database, that defaults to tying into the Linux pass/user database, so if you want to set up some custom login-data... ugh, I don't even want to think about it. I set it up once, maintain it here and then, and am keeping it, because dismantling the system is more work than maintaining it presently, but seriously... with the above setup, do it only for educa…

i've been following these since lenny, https://workaround.org/ispmail

pretty much a set & forget solution. He also writes a new one with all-you-need-to-know extras every time a stable release of debian comes out.

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#87

Post by brianpgordon »

esotericn wrote: post #76
brianpgordon wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be nice if these big mail services accepted actual proof of work as a way to guarantee that your mail gets through. Maybe someone could extend SMTP with a bitcoin-like challenge where the server sends the client a nonce and a difficulty factor, and the client has to reply with a suffix that you can append to the nonce so that the whole string hashes to something with the corresponding number of zeroes at the…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash > Hashcash was proposed in 1997 by Adam Back[1] and described more formally in Back's paper "Hashcash - A Denial of Service Counter-Measure".[2]

I guess the idea was too obvious to be original. I'm surprised that it inspired Bitcoin instead of the other way around though.

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#88

Post by duxup »

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,…

I wonder how much background knowledge is needed to execute those 20 commands with confidence.

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#90

Post by fanf2 »

brianpgordon wrote: post #74
akerl_ wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article handwaves this by pointing out that it’s “proof-of-work”. Which is a fancy way of saying “it requires a bunch of work, continuously as the rules change over time”. Which is why I’d consider it “hard” to run my own mail server. The complexity of running a daemon with a config file isn’t the issue, nor is it that any individual task of SPF/DKIM/etc is complex. It’s that I generally want to put 0% of my time…

It would be nice if these big mail services accepted actual proof of work as a way to guarantee that your mail gets through. Maybe someone could extend SMTP with a bitcoin-like challenge where the server sends the client a nonce and a difficulty factor, and the client has to reply with a suffix that you can append to the nonce so that the whole string hashes to something with the corresponding number of zeroes at the…

Proof of work proves not to work (2004)

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rnc1/proofwork.pdf

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