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The “mail is hard” myth

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Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#201

Post by nocman »

scarface74 wrote: post #81
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 expla…

That's all great until interruptions in the service you are depending on interferes with your business getting done (and you can't fix or mitigate the problem yourself).

Don't get me wrong, if you choose your partners carefully you can make this work in many (probably most) scenarios, and save yourself some headaches in the process. But even with the bigger players (like AWS), there is a tradeoff to handing such things over to someone else. Services aren't always as reliable and partners aren't always as resposive as they are advertised.

I totally get why people don't want to do such things themselves. I just think it is important for people to realize that doing so has its own set of consequences and risks that they should be aware of. I suspect most of the folks on HN are aware of this, but there does seem to be an awful lot of "it would be dumb to do that yourself" sentiment here.

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#202

Post by gfodor »

pera wrote: post #162
gfodor wrote: post #136

Number of times I have had the problem of "email not working for some reason" since switching to gmail ~20 years ago: zero. Number of times I had this problem when running my own mail server (and presumably would have today): non-zero. There's your entire explanation as to why this is a losing battle. Just one incident of an email delivery problem probably outweighs any privacy risk wrt using a centralized provider w…

Not everybody weights privacy (and decentralization and control) vs convenience in the same way. By the way, how many times did you get locked out of your Gmail account vs how many times did the same happen with your own server?

Not once. Tbf, I am considering the herculean task of getting off of gmail, but if I were to go with my own server the burden has basically nothing to do with setting up the email server (easy) as this post might suggest, but instead the burden and latent risk involved of having to be personally responsible for operating, maintaining, and being exposed to externialities (like 0days, being blocked by filters, server outages, etc.) Setting up services is trivial compared to the aggregate cost in time, money, and context-switching tax over time of operating them.

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#203

Post by gfodor »

beagle3 wrote: post #167
gfodor wrote: post #136

Number of times I have had the problem of "email not working for some reason" since switching to gmail ~20 years ago: zero. Number of times I had this problem when running my own mail server (and presumably would have today): non-zero. There's your entire explanation as to why this is a losing battle. Just one incident of an email delivery problem probably outweighs any privacy risk wrt using a centralized provider w…

It’s true, but it is only half the story. I’ve used a paid provider other than gmail for 18 years. I occasionally had problems starting a couple of years ago, and every single one of them was caused by google not delivering a mail (or marking it spam, which is for almost all practical purposes, not delivering it). I eventually caved in and switched to fastmail - and everything is good since then. Google is giving you…

My point was that running your own server isn't about just getting Hello World working, its about the fact that you basically are now living in a world where you will potentially have delivery failures of your email, or incidental things you need to fix at random. Imagine if this is how your phone worked: on a given day, you may find yourself suddenly having to learn about why your phone calls stopped going through, or in general, 0.01% of the time people can't reach you with no explainable reason. The idea I could wake up on a random Tuesday and find myself debugging ancient erlang code to diagnose my phone calls regressing feels no less disastrous than having to read the source code to my email server if/when it mysteriously stops working.

In any case, this is a argument as to why it's an uphill battle to convince people that running your own server is an easy endeavor. (Which seemed to be the point of this post.) It says nothing about switching off of gmail to another provider as you did, or if the actual burden of running a server is worth the privacy trade-off for an individual (i'd argue for most it isn't, but wasn't really the point i was trying to make.)

Switching from Google to another 3rd party provider doesn't eliminate privacy risk, it shifts around the probability distribution for certain kinds of events to occur. (Arguably, so does hosting your own server, but hosting your own server does rule out large classes of failures.)

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#204

Post by hexane360 »

bad_user wrote: post #163
purple_ducks wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> producing your own milk is healthier How's that?

Growing up in communism, under the Iron Curtain, we weren't finding too much milk in the eighties at the store, so our source for dairy was the country side, friends, family, grandparents, so I grew up with raw milk. Raw milk from grass fed animals has a very different, much richer taste. For one you can control what you feed your animals. The taste and quality of milk varies greatly depending on what they eat. You c…

There's little evidence that raw milk has higher "nutritional quality". Taste you can make an argument for, and raw milk is definitely required for yogurt & cheese if you don't want to introduce your own cultures.

I'd also note that "pasteurization" can mean different things in different countries. In Europe it's usually more extreme than in the U.S., as the milk is heated ~60 °C higher for a shorter period.

[1]: https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/drinking-raw-milk#claim...

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#205

Post by Kwpolska »

gingerlime wrote: post #50
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…

And if you try to host it on Digital Ocean, they actually block port 25 out, so you're out of luck... And you have to manage diskspace, backups, firewall/fail2ban, OS updates etc etc etc I'm in the same boat as you. Managed to grind my teeth and pull through something like this for my own use and family, but it was painful.

I've got a mail server on DigitalOcean. Just tested and port 25 works fine. The internet says you can get the restriction lifted after 60 days: https://github.com/3s3s/opentrade/issues/136#issuecomment-42...

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#206

Post by donmcronald »

zelly wrote: post #189

I've done this a couple times, and I think it's sufficiently difficult that if in the future I were hiring for a Linux sysadmin, I'd have them set up a mail server (that doesn't get spamfiltered) in less than 24 hours. I never got spam filtered once DKIM/SPF/rDNS/DMARC were properly configured. I think _this_ is the myth that Big Email spreads. Linux mail servers are hard, but getting past filters is actually not har…

Getting past the filters isn't hard. It's impossible.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19945846

That's a super high value domain (facebookmail.com) with perfect config getting filtered as SPAM by Google.

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#207

Post by brianpgordon »

jcranmer wrote: post #169
brianpgordon wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The value to spammers isn't in email delivered, it's the actual user engagement at the end of the process. A million messages delivered to the inbox is worth far more than a billion messages delivered to the spam folder.

Keep increasing the PoW cost and think about where that line of argument leads you. "One message delivered to the inbox is worth far more than a billion messages delivered to the spam folder." One single delivered message is going to be profitable for the spammer? Clearly not. This proves the existence of some break-even point at a lower cost. Mail providers just need to set the cost above this point.

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#208

Post by eikenberry »

darekkay wrote: post #170
newscracker wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> and provide more, like Posteo Thanks for mentioning some alternatives, but I've just checked the first example and it does not support custom domains (which Fastmail does), so it does not "provide more".

Hasty generalization. Many of those in that list support custom domains. Only checking the first and applying that to all is just lazy.

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#209

Post by scarface74 »

nocman wrote: post #201
scarface74 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 expla…

That's all great until interruptions in the service you are depending on interferes with your business getting done (and you can't fix or mitigate the problem yourself). Don't get me wrong, if you choose your partners carefully you can make this work in many (probably most) scenarios, and save yourself some headaches in the process. But even with the bigger players (like AWS), there is a tradeoff to handing such thin…

Don't get me wrong, if you choose your partners carefully you can make this work in many (probably most) scenarios, and save yourself some headaches in the process. But even with the bigger players (like AWS), there is a tradeoff to handing such things over to someone else. Services aren't always as reliable and partners aren't always as resposive as they are advertised.

AWS is a lot more reliable than almost any in house solution. As far as being responsive, if you have a business support plan with AWS, you can always reach live, helpful support. Trust me, being on the Dev side, when I need resources on AWS, it’s just a click, script, or CloudFormation template away. Getting resources provisioned through the infrastructure gatekeepers can literally take weeks.

And just from the CYA standpoint and “no one ever got fired for buying IBM”. If your colo goes down everyone looks at you crazy and you have a lot of questions to answer. If AWS goes down and you took the appropriate steps at least making your infrastructure AZ redundant if not multi region redundant, it’s going to make news and no one is going to question why you chose AWS.

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#210

Post by anteatersa »

skrause wrote: post #16

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…

This is true, I run a small mailserver for myself, friends and family. I eventually gave up trying to get mail delivered to the major mail services and now just send postfix mail through Amazon Simple Email Service.
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