[deleted]
The “mail is hard” myth
101–110 of 311 posts
Re: The “mail is hard” myth
#102In addition to the other comments about what is meant by “hard”, there is a crucial omission in this article: the failure mode of e-mail deliverability can be both hard to detect, and extremely costly. I wouldn’t mind hosting a blog, because worst case scenario I’m offline for a few minutes, pingdom alerts me, and we’re back. Total cost: some lost blog readers.
If I fail my outbound email setup, it can be months before I realise that most of my emails have been getting dropped. Total cost: I depend on email for work and family, so very high.
I used to host my own email. Tested with gmail: delivery was fine. Half a year later it turns out Hotmail was silently dropping my mails. I felt betrayed, and learned my lesson: email is hard.
Re: The “mail is hard” myth
#103Earlier 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…
> 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.
> It also heavily penalizes people who legitimately need to send bulk email.
Aka spammers.
Re: The “mail is hard” myth
#104Managed mail server clusters for years with an ISP. Agreed, too many things that can break and cause PITA. However, ‘Hard’ is a subjective term. The deeper you are in a trade or the longer you have done it, the easier it comes to feel. I visited a family farm and found it very very hard to squeeze milk outta buffalo. My great uncle however has dealt with that buffalo that for years and didn’t sweat it one bit. In a s…
Buffalo milking is the new yak shaving
Re: The “mail is hard” myth
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is also talked about in the article, is your experience to the contrary?
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…
In my experience of over 15 years, the "rules" have only changed 3 times since I started. First to require good reverse DNS, then to require SPF, last to require DKIM. The transition on each of those was generally several years with plenty of publicity.
Re: The “mail is hard” myth
#106Managed mail server clusters for years with an ISP. Agreed, too many things that can break and cause PITA. However, ‘Hard’ is a subjective term. The deeper you are in a trade or the longer you have done it, the easier it comes to feel. I visited a family farm and found it very very hard to squeeze milk outta buffalo. My great uncle however has dealt with that buffalo that for years and didn’t sweat it one bit. In a s…
Buffalo milking is the new yak shaving
[deleted]
Re: The “mail is hard” myth
#107While the email experts are in this thread, can I get a guide on how to setup a simple email address @ my own domain?
If you google, most of the top hits are for free mail forwarding using your domain registrar. I tried this and it was pretty terrible with a ton of caveats. For example using namecheap you can only receive but not send from that domain, can't receive attachments, and can't even send an email to yourself for testing purposes.
I think the easiest way is to pay GSuite $6/month?
Re: The “mail is hard” myth
#108Earlier 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…
Proof of work proves not to work (2004) http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rnc1/proofwork.pdf
The paper's argument assumes that the PoW scheme is required though. It could be an option which just guarantees that individual mail can get through, while still keeping the usual reputation-based spam filtering for clients which don't want to participate.
Re: The “mail is hard” myth
#109I remember that I had to set up sendmail via m4 scripts to use mutt on a local machine. Those were fun days.
Re: The “mail is hard” myth
#110People 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.
[deleted]