I've run my own mailserver since the late 2000s. I've never had much trouble with deliverability. Spam hasn't been a real issue either --- I run with deliberately light spam filtering because I find the occasional ridiculous spam email hilarious. (My favorite spam of all time begins "Yes, I am Bernie Madoff".)
The “mail is hard” myth
251–260 of 311 posts
Re: The “mail is hard” myth
#252Earlier 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…
> I do encourage you to try find such a source. The difference in taste is well worth it.
I'm in Europe.
> the pasteurization process reduces the nutritional quality of milk
It doesn't reduce the nutritional quality substantially though does it?
Europe Food Safety Authority advises to not drink raw unpasteurised milk due to potential health risks (http://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/efsajournal/pub/3940.htm) echoing what many national countries have advised "at a minimum, boil the milk before drinking it to kill potentially harmful bacteria"
Any perceived nutritional gain is marginal and is far outweighed by risk of illness.
Re: The “mail is hard” myth
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
That's amusing because the bigs all ignore RBLs. RBLs are only used by the little operators.
And RBLs aren't that great. I visited this in January of 2018 [1] and in my case (where I do greylisting [2][3]but nothing else for spam) it wouldn't help.
[1] http://boston.conman.org/2018/01/10.1
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greylisting
[3] And yes, I do run my own server. It's just for me, so I have no issues with "customer requests" and I've been using the same IP address for about a decade (maybe more). Then again, I've been running my own email sever since 1998.
Re: The “mail is hard” myth
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
You use past tense... why? They still exist and seem to be continuing their blacklist/blackmail BS. The ISP in question was AT&T and their subsidiaries (I mostly got hit sending to bellsouth.net), which I wouldn't consider to be that small of an ISP and was enough that I eventually gave up.
Past (more than 5 years ago as I reckon) is when I locked horns with them. They may have switched policies, I may have gotten smarter than them, who knows.
Maybe your provider was taken off their lists. My last run-in was only 2 years ago, so as of then they hadn't changed.
Re: The “mail is hard” myth
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It also heavily penalizes people who legitimately need to send bulk email. Aka spammers.
(Note: deleted and moved here because I put it in reply to the wrong comment) I work for an email marketing provider (opinions my own, obviously), and I was extremely surprised how many people genuinely want to receive lots of commercial bulk marketing email. And by "want to" I don't mean "don't mark as spam", I mean "continually sign up for different marketing newsletters, and consistently use links in newsletters/m…
Sure, I do this. A lot of stuff people buy is often a lot cheaper with promotions. Just the other day, I bought a $600 set of tires for $300-380 (depending on whether or not I remember to do the mail in rebate). That alone is well worth the few clicks it took to filter mails from that list out of my inbox and into a label for car-related marketing.
I have a couple of broad categories for these filters like car stuff, computer stuff, other-hobby-related-stuff and of course clothing, and just take a look at the appropriate one when I need or want something. Takes virtually no time, and saves a lot of money.
Of course I'm not gonna lie, I do end up buying things that I wouldn't have bought otherwise by doing this. But some of those things are pretty cool, too. :) I do have a few more cheap ARM boards of various types than I can probably use, though.
Re: The “mail is hard” myth
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can use hosted mail with pgp/gpg if you don't want anyone reading your mail. Otherwise your mail is read in transit on the way to you anyway, so self hosting is false privacy.
Isn't most SMTP traffic over TLS, these days?
Most SMTP traffic is to or from a few large companies.
Re: The “mail is hard” myth
#257Why would I WANT to run a mail server, regardless if it’s hard or not? I don’t gain a lot of value, and now I’m on the hook for everything not fun.
Re: The “mail is hard” myth
#258Email is hard across time. Meaning yes, I can setup a mail server, and yes I can configure DKIM+SPF, and yes I can initially get good delivery to all the major providers. But that's just the beginning. Email is an ongoing maintenance responsibility. And problems with mail delivery are almost always an emergency for yourself or your clients. Nothing quite matches the gut punch of being on time for a deadline then havi…
>Email is an ongoing maintenance responsibility.
True, but it is generally fairly minimal.
Re: The “mail is hard” myth
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
Past (more than 5 years ago as I reckon) is when I locked horns with them. They may have switched policies, I may have gotten smarter than them, who knows.
Maybe your provider was taken off their lists. My last run-in was only 2 years ago, so as of then they hadn't changed.
I was the ISP, & they had BL'd one of my servers for delivering NDRs. They used to blacklist /16 netblocks wholesale for this kind of, "sins", and demand ransom for getting out.
Re: The “mail is hard” myth
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eh, it used to be pretty bad but the other year the people from the openbsd project wrote a new mail server with a trivially easy to understand config file (I wrote mine from scratch just a couple hours after finding it.) If you’re already basically competent with the OS you’re using and have a machine with a decent connection that can be used for mail then it actually isn’t hard.
The config file format is the least of your worries (unless you're running Sendmail, ofcourse). It's about havimg to know about DKIM/SPF/dns weirdness/ etc, and having to stay up to date; about blacklists and greylists and the social dynamics around it; about mailbox storage and backups and users complaining about quotas and attachment sizes and that sort of shenanigans; about how will I let my users set auto respond…
> just send them a link to the sieve man page!
That would work if mail providers actually used Sieve, but almost none of them do. I've never understood why.