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The “mail is hard” myth

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Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#151

Post by newscracker »

flurdy wrote: post #112

A mail server is hard. Writing applications is hard. Designing a website is hard. Professional work is hard. But setting up your initial mail server is not hard. Read some guides (ahem: https://flurdy.com/docs/postfix ), fix a lot of typos, and you're up an running. Same with developing the initial version of an application, or designing the first draft. Not rocket science. Not easy but not that hard for an experienc…

> If you just want a reliable mail service, just use...

non-Fastmail options that are a lot cheaper for multiple mailboxes and provide more, like Posteo, Mailbox.org, Runbox.com, Mailfence, Migadu, etc.

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#152

Post by apecat »

isoos wrote: post #64

This tool needs more attention: https://mailinabox.email/ (tagline: "Take back control of your email with this easy-to-deploy mail server in a box.") I haven't uses it for a while, but last time I wanted to setup a self-hosted server for a domain, this came out the best. (I've handed over the task to somebody else, so no idea how it went.)

Long-term vise I think this is a dubious solution to "set up and forget", or advise people with few resources or limited Linux skills to use.

Mail in a Box makes it seem passably easy to someone with basic skills to get everything up and running, but then don't support in-place upgrades of the underlying operating system. This might be fine, but I really hope people realize what they're getting themselves into. https://discourse.mailinabox.email/t/mail-in-a-box-version-v...

This critique is somewhat shallow, if the backup/restore option is easy enough. But I just have a hunch there's going to be a lot of non-upgraded boxes running fullstack-EOL everything.

Of course, a system that does in-place upgrades and then fails is going to leave no-one any happier either.

I guess that my point really is that appliances requiring "complicated" upgrades by moving to a new OS install aren't all that mature. But I acknowledge I have a hard time determining who this product really is for.

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#154

Post by flas9sd »

Setting up and maintaining a mail server is not hard for the initiated, but I fear is archaic and endangered to be irrelevant as basis for interpersonal communication beyond a work context. It has its place as identity provider, able to receive invoices, but this can be subject to change too - and only newsletters and mailing lists will remain.

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#155

Post by kbenson »

octorian wrote: post #119
flurdy wrote: post #112

A mail server is hard. Writing applications is hard. Designing a website is hard. Professional work is hard. But setting up your initial mail server is not hard. Read some guides (ahem: https://flurdy.com/docs/postfix ), fix a lot of typos, and you're up an running. Same with developing the initial version of an application, or designing the first draft. Not rocket science. Not easy but not that hard for an experienc…

> If you just want a reliable mail service, just use https://fastmail.com . If you want even more freedom and configurations, do try to set up a mail server. But it is hard. A bit hard. I used to run my own mail server, but I eventually migrated to Fastmail. I liked then because their software stack was similar enough to mine (compatible filter rules) and I knew where to find their admin on IRC. The reason I made the…

You switch to a third party mail provider for the same reason you buy a new car instead of driving around your classic you've been fixing up as a daily driver. Not because you don't like it, but because sometimes there's benefit in offloading the annoying bits of your hobby so you can focus on the interesting bits.

Fixing up an old car is fun. Doing it in chunks of a few hours so you can drive it work the next day is less fun.

Running your own mail server is a fun challenge at first, as you have to figure out why some random site won't talk to your server, or why your load spikes at random times. Then you decide that diagnosing other people's broken configs and dealing with drive by spammers is annoying and boring.

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#156

Post by brianpgordon »

jcranmer wrote: post #128
brianpgordon wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That doesn't make sense. Each email is only worth so much to a spammer. They can't lose money on every email and make up for it with volume.

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#157

Post by fit2rule »

Running your own mail server is like having a pet dog. You have to keep it in good shape, exercise it, feed it well .. chain it up when necessary, clean up after it and so on. Keep the neighbours kids from stealing it and using it to deliver drugs, etc.

If you treat it like a pet, it makes it a lot easier to manager. "Oh, did I forget to check the mail logs this week", and so on..

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#158

Post by gsliepen »

My experience with running my own mailservers for the last 20 years: it's definitely not hard. It's not painless, you need to spend a little bit of time now and then, and you need to know a little bit more about email than how to hit "send" in your mail client.

It's annoying that the default settings of almost all mail server software are suboptimal, but once I set it up correctly (yes, that took some time but nowadays there are plenty of tutorials) I had to do almost no maintenance at all. Apart from power failures that were unavoidable, the biggest issue has been spam blocker lists becoming outdated or going out of service. After that, the occasional hickup after a dist-upgrade or moving to a different country. But on average, my mail server is working perfectly fine 364 out of 365.2425 days. And, this is considerably better than the mail servers at the universities and companies I've worked at. Your Gmail might have given you no problems, but it is not working 100% of the time for everyone either.

So I'd say maintaining your own mailserver is as hard as painting rooms yourself, or changing the battery or light bulbs of a car. Not everyone wants to do that, and that's fine. If you're not afraid of it, it's a rewarding experience.

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#159

Post by jethro_tell »

octorian wrote: post #120
dsukhin wrote: post #116

I would venture a guess that even the most technically savvy users who could set up their own mailsever now, still flock to "Big Mailer Corps" for the easy to use mail client filled with useful AI features, etc. and that even in the presence of an easy alternative to set up their own, will end up forwarding to their "Big Mailer Corp" of choice that offers them the most efficient user experience for their workflow. IM…

> a cometivtive open source mail (web) app Yes, this is a big deal. So many web applications provided by companies as "cloud services" are orders of magnitude better than equivalent web applications you can run on your own damn servers.

Which is hardly shocking since they pay a bunch of people to work on it.

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#160

Post by pw6hv »

defanor wrote: post #149
ogoffart wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Why do you think that? The article mention exactly this could just be a myth that perpetuates because people repeat it without actually trying it. In fact, I used to think exactly like you when I originally set up my personal mail server and opted fo…

Not GP, but it matches my experience: with reverse DNS, DKIM, SPF, being in DNSWL (and not in DNSBLs) some of my messages end up in Gmail spam folders (very recently received a reply to a message I sent 3 years ago because of that, for instance). A while ago there were strange issues with Google-hosted mailing lists as well, with some messages not being visible even to an ML administrator, while Gmail servers accepte…

> some of my messages end up in Gmail spam folders (very recently received a reply to a message I sent 3 years ago because of that, for instance)

How did this happen if Gmail deletes spam after some weeks?

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