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The “mail is hard” myth

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Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#291

Post by Shorn »

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…

I've built https://kopi.cloud to try to provide an alternative option in between being locked in to a big mail service and running your own mail servers.

It's a consumer-oriented SaaS for taking control of your personal mail - there is no enterprise pricing, nor even a subscription pricing option - though you can you can choose to pre-pay for the service years in advance.

Kopi uses Amazon SES for email delivery. We know Amazon wants to make sure that their service is a viable product for mail delivery at the commercial enterprise level. The idea is that Kopi can survive as a viable retail product by riding on the coat-tails of that desire and arbitraging the cost of mail handling via SES so it's cost-effective at consumer level.

The intention is to run it as cheaply as I can, ($1USD / month at the moment, though I make no guarantee that it can stay that cheap forever) and to give people the ability to choose between different mail services.

The idea is that you can manage your own domain, and setup your DNS to use Kopi as your mail exchange via DNS MX records to forward your email to whatever mail service you choose to use. If people don't want to even run their own domain, they can can use the shared Kopi domains if they want - with the understanding that those mail addresses are locked to the Kopi service, but at least they can change mail service whenever they want.

The goal is to be easy enough to use that you can set up your email handling via a smart phone, and cheap enough that running your own email handling using free software should seem expensive by comparison.

Though I'll admit - marketing this thing is a bit of a problem right now :)

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#293

Post by austhrow743 »

majewsky wrote: post #289
austhrow743 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI there was an article on here a little while ago about a man that used GDPR to get access to all emails by his colleagues that mentioned his name.

Citation needed. This is certainly not the intent of the law. If this story is true, that mail provider ('s data protection officer) broke the law.

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/university-blacklist-ac...

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#294

Post by number6 »

roel_v wrote: post #284
number6 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Running my own for about 2 years now. Spf dMarc and dkim set it is accepted by all mail providers. I also get daily reports from Google how well it behaves

"I also get daily reports from Google how well it behaves" Do you ever read them? If so, how is daily (!) routine maintenance of your email setup not a massive (well, relatively speaking) headache?

As mentioned by another user:

"The dmarc reports from Google do not actually give you the portion of email that is placed in recipients' spam folder."

So it is just about the server and and dns part (the things I as an administrator can control)

Since I configured it in the beginning the reports are all green so I just glance over them. Takes about 10 seconds.

Then again I like to work with infrastructure so your mileage may vary in regard to how much headaches it causes

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#295

Post by u801e »

toomim wrote: post #143
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…

I think that because I tried it and my outgoing emails weren't being delivered. Big mail companies have blacklisted entire C-blocks of IP addresses at VPS providers, because parts of those blocks have been used to send spam in the past, and you won't know until you actually check with people you are sending mail to, to ask if they've received them. It sucks.

Wouldn't the mail server log the connection attempt and the rejection reason?

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#296

Post by prirun »

brianpgordon wrote: post #74
akerl_ wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

It's an interesting idea, but wouldn't this be easy to abuse though, like Gmail could force Fastmail to do huge proofs of work before accepting their mail?

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#297

Post by commandersaki »

A tale of caution for those would-be self hosters: a friend of mine had a Linux system running mail operations and somehow got ransomwared (theory is via supermicro IPMI). All the filesystems were encrypted and the console login banner was changed to an attacker controlled advertisement to a TOR address for getting the system unlocked. He didn't pay. Logs show there was no data ex-filtration. But as usual, his backups were a couple months old so he lost a significant chunk of his email (he used web interface/imap and I don't think he cached his email locally).

I felt vindicated, giving up self-hosting of email and pushing it towards a third party provider because I was concerned about backup/disaster recovery scenarios. When something fundamentally shakes up your life - you might not have the ability to function well and managing a mail server is a stress you could live without.

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#298

Post by commandersaki »

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…

1. buy domain

2. buy fastmail subscription

3. set domain nameservers at registrar to point to fastmail

4. setup domain on fastmail, setup email on fastmail, setup aliases (you need to pay for extra subscriptions to have separate mail users; i think same applies with gsuite).

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#299

Post by pdonis »

roel_v wrote: post #287
pdonis wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

... Can't tell if you're serious or not - but if you are, just looking at man sieve is enough to understand why no sane person would give an average end user access to that. I mean I used it for many years but I'm a nerd weirdo.

> just looking at man sieve is enough to understand why no sane person would give an average end user access to that

You don't have to force an average user to hand edit Sieve files. You can put the same kind of GUI or web interface on top of a Sieve file that current mail providers put on top of whatever hand-built custom non-standard filtering rules system they currently have. To the end user it would look the same.

But for an end user like me, who already has a huge number of filter rules expressed in Sieve and would like to be able to upload them to an email provider, not supporting the Internet standard format for filter rules is a showstopper. I don't want to have to re-input all my filter rules into an email provider's web interface one by one. I want them to be able to understand the rules I already have in the Internet standard format I already have them.

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#300

Post by hakfoo »

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.

One of the big corner cases I've noticed is transaction-oriented email-- the password resets, "welcome to your account" emails, order details, shipping notifications. People want these, but they're probably harder to deliver than personal email or much spammier bulk mail sent directly via outsourced experts.

These have a lot of iffy issues.

* Since they're going to be generated by the ecommerce service, it may not be running on the same server or IP block as your main mail infrastructure, so you might have to specially configure around that.

* The content-- hundreds of messages a day, at seemingly scattershot recipients and highly templated-- screams spammy nto the wrong algorithm.

Yeah, there's services like Mandrill, but the whole ecosystem feels broken. It's not serving mailers. It's not serving the recipients very well. It seems designed to please a small, delicate, vocal audience. The people so upset at the prospect of false negatives (spam in the inbox) that they rally around providers who are prone to aggressive false positives. Who are these people and what makes them tick?

I could see this backlash in a situation where it's high risk or cost, but users can manage their own filters in any half-decent mail system, and frankly, clicking through a few pieces of spam a week is not a big deal-- arguably far less a hassle than spending an hour on the phone to get a tracking number that a spam filer ate.

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