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The “mail is hard” myth

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Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#121

Post by bluedino »

zawerf wrote: post #107

While 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 yourse…

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/how-t...

That what you're looking for?

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#122

Post by dasil003 »

Nullabillity wrote: post #103
jcranmer wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Believe it or not there are email newsletters and mailing lists that people legitimately want to receive.

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#123

Post by bluedino »

fareesh wrote: post #41

Which user demographic is running one's own email server ideal for? My consultancy handles "all things technology" for multiple small businesses (sized 1-50 people, located mostly in South Asia). Anecdotally: A lot of these folks are happily using mybusinesname.accounts@gmail.com and so-on, but decide to get their own domain for the added veneer of "professionalism". Many are happy to use Yandex (1000 users with your…

Lots of businesses run their own email server. It's not that complicated.

The easiest way to do it is to buy an email server, you can use Exchange or you can use something like iMail or Kerio.

Install that on a server, get a static IP from your ISP, put the server behind a firewall, and point your DNS servers for your domain to it. Then generate an SPF record, and you should be good.

That's how many people do it. As a bonus, you don't need to pay $10/user per month for hosted mail, or deal with Exchange licenses, but you will probably want to back the server up from time to time. You even get webmail with it!

The advantage/disadvantage of this setup is that it's now up to you get to get yourself off spam blacklists and such. When BIG_EMAIL_HOST is having problems, there's nothing you can do but wait. But with your own servers, you are the one who gets to email the spam department of BIG_ISP to request removal, and then there's nothing you can do but wait.

If you know Linux, you can setup Postfix, but I did say 'the easy way'.

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#124

Post by jcranmer »

dasil003 wrote: post #122
Nullabillity wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It also heavily penalizes people who legitimately need to send bulk email. Aka spammers.

Believe it or not there are email newsletters and mailing lists that people legitimately want to receive.

Such as the Linux kernel mailing list.

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#125

Post by amelius »

akerl_ wrote: post #34
SahAssar wrote: post #25

Earlier 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…

> Which is a fancy way of saying “it requires a bunch of work, continuously as the rules change over time”.

Wouldn't this be a good task for an open-source package to handle? If you'd just updated the package regularly, your mail would always be sent according to the rules. No need for any third-party handling your mail.

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#126

Post by luxuryballs »

I remember a story where a guy had the DNS of his custom mail domain changed after a malicious actor social engineered his domain name provider. The story was coupled with the recommendation to use a mail provider for the added protection that it would in theory be way less likely for their domain used by many accounts to be hijacked in this way. The guy got really screwed because once they got his domain and thus his email they could change passwords all over.

I finally ditched gmail once I realized how politically motivated Google was, and I also realized that I’d rather have a company owe me the service rather than using a free one where they could technically disable my email at any time.

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#127

Post by beams_of_light »

klingonopera wrote: post #13

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 you…

Trying to avoid the landmines of blacklisting is really the biggest peril in all of it. I refuse to move a company I support away from GSuite to self-hosted, because I have a high level of confidence that just one person sending a lot of mail to another person outside the company could result in our domain ending up in RBLs, which is very difficult to reverse. Running a mail server in 2019 is not something I need the headache of.

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#128

Post by jcranmer »

brianpgordon wrote: post #108
fanf2 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If there's one lesson from the history of spamming, it's that spammers are among the fastest adopters of anti-spam technologies. If PoW meant that spammers could only send 1/100th the email, but the email was 1000× more likely to actually show up in an inbox, spammers would jump on it in a heartbeat.

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#129

Post by amelius »

jcranmer wrote: post #124
dasil003 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Believe it or not there are email newsletters and mailing lists that people legitimately want to receive.

Such as the Linux kernel mailing list.

Yeah, but for bulk-mail one could introduce "whitelists".

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#130

Post by amelius »

brianpgordon wrote: post #108
fanf2 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also, they didn't consider that slow machines can still provide proof of work by relaying it to a fast machine (perhaps in exchange for real money).
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