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How to run your own mail server (2017)

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Re: How to run your own mail server (2017)

#231

Post by LIV2 »

syntheticnature wrote: post #52
rhizome wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This criticism came up last time too, and I replied that I've been running my own mail server for 20 years off of a DSL line, and I have no trouble sending to anybody (that I've heard of from recipients nor MAILER-DAEMON). I have DKIM, SPF and no relaying and the only issue in recent memory was when AT&T started bouncing me for some reason. I emailed postmaster@ saying "hey wats up," and the block was removed a day o…

Do you know that your messages arrive in all cases? Not merely fail to bounce, but arrive? I help with IT for a small non-profit membership org, and the problem isn't the places that throw errors when you send, but the ones that silently accept the message without complaint and route it to /dev/null. We get through fine to Google, but the other big providers are random at best about it.

Some mail systems can tell you if a user is valid or not during the initial connection while some forward to another mail system or delivery process and therefore cannot tell your MX during their conversation that the recipient is invalid.

The downstream MX could be configured to then send an NDR email itself but this lands you on spam lists as "backscattering" will then send spam back to whoever owns the email address the spammer is spoofing so it's generally not done.

Re: How to run your own mail server (2017)

#232

Post by brongondwana »

wpietri wrote: post #162
brongondwana wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two options: 1. share everyone's mailboxes to an admin user who does the backup via IMAP. 2. create an app-password for each user which can be used to backup that user. This can be done as an admin user on your account. Neither of them require knowing the user's password - an admin can override into each account unless it's specifically locked down to deny that. It does require a separate app password per account, we…

Ah, interesting! Yes, I'd be fine with either of those. Right now I'm just backing up via rsync of the maildir tree, so it's not like these are any worse. I just didn't want to a) know my user's passwords, and b) have to have them give it to me any time they changed it. Thanks for the tip. Maybe my Christmas present to myself will be to murder my mailserver!

Sorry - busy at IETF this week, didn't get to reply before. I would recommend the per-user app passwords over sharing all the folders to an admin account - because that way you see the \Seen flags as the user when backing up.

Re: How to run your own mail server (2017)

#233

Post by brongondwana »

blowski wrote: post #120
couchand wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you clarify what you mean by "security"? I've found Fastmail's spam filtering to be quite excellent: very few false positives (usually just non-spam marketing messages) and almost no false negatives.

Security - I think Fastmail is pretty good at security, but I don't think there's another firm on the planet that does as well at security as Google. Specifically, I found Fastmail's implementation of 2FA to be a bit lacking. I imagine that a determined attacker would find it easier to abuse their support processes, since Fastmail's support is quite helpful whereas Google barely even responds. Spam filtering - I have…

By the way - I told our support team that you told them they were quite helpful. They are pleased to hear that feedback :)

Seriously though, we have been making as much effort as possible to push the account recovery away from being an "agent decides" to following an automated process. We famously got this wrong once many years ago, and have learned from that!

So the fact that our lovely support people are very helpful once they have identified a person does not mean they are pushovers for an attacker.

Re: How to run your own mail server (2017)

#234

Post by DJHenk »

jjav wrote: post #161
dpcan wrote: post #22

Then you realize the true pain of having a near-zero reputation when trying to email anything to people on Gmail, Yahoo, Live, etc, etc. Expect to go to spam even if you have DKIM, SPF, and no relaying. If anyone actually knows the secret to not having your own mail-server's mail go to spam on these bigger systems, please tell, I've Googled it for years with no success.

There is no one secret you can google. There is also no need to perpetuate the fear of running your own email. Decentralization of core internet services helps us all, not just the person doing it. So to anyone seriously interested and willing to learn, I highly recommend running your own email servers. If you expect 100% delivery rate, you won't necessarily get that, no matter who is running your email infrastructur…

> And by doing so I avoid giving google the power to cut me off from email because some arbitrary ML gone bad.

Technically maybe. But if most of the people you want to mail are on Gmail, as is the case for many, a cut off from Google is almost as bad.

Re: How to run your own mail server (2017)

#235

Post by mariorossi666 »

DJHenk wrote: post #234
jjav wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no one secret you can google. There is also no need to perpetuate the fear of running your own email. Decentralization of core internet services helps us all, not just the person doing it. So to anyone seriously interested and willing to learn, I highly recommend running your own email servers. If you expect 100% delivery rate, you won't necessarily get that, no matter who is running your email infrastructur…

> And by doing so I avoid giving google the power to cut me off from email because some arbitrary ML gone bad. Technically maybe. But if most of the people you want to mail are on Gmail, as is the case for many, a cut off from Google is almost as bad.

But then you can easily spot the issue and solve it (or at least try) or blame Google.

If you lose access to your emails and Google doesn't even have to explain why IMHO it is really bad.

Re: How to run your own mail server (2017)

#236

Post by dgl »

wpietri wrote: post #30
dpcan wrote: post #22

Then you realize the true pain of having a near-zero reputation when trying to email anything to people on Gmail, Yahoo, Live, etc, etc. Expect to go to spam even if you have DKIM, SPF, and no relaying. If anyone actually knows the secret to not having your own mail-server's mail go to spam on these bigger systems, please tell, I've Googled it for years with no success.

Agreed! I've been running my own mail server for 20+ years, and I would not recommend that anybody do this on a lark. Deliverability to GMail is a huge problem for me and has been for years. I even asked friends at Google to find out what the story was. All I got back is that the mail group was so careful/paranoid it wouldn't talk to them either. I would long ago have switched over to a vendor, but I use qmail-style…

I switched over to Gsuite and I use qmail style addresses, it’s not as friendly as using + addressing (as in it just works) but you can use regexp rewrites on the paid versions of Gsuite to fake it.

(Disclosure: xoogler, but still happy with Gsuite...)

Re: How to run your own mail server (2017)

#237

Post by huhtenberg »

Jaruzel wrote: post #228
wpietri wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed! I've been running my own mail server for 20+ years, and I would not recommend that anybody do this on a lark. Deliverability to GMail is a huge problem for me and has been for years. I even asked friends at Google to find out what the story was. All I got back is that the mail group was so careful/paranoid it wouldn't talk to them either. I would long ago have switched over to a vendor, but I use qmail-style…

I do two things: 1. Send mail via a static IP (that I pay extra for) 2. Send all mail through a reputable 'smarthost' (mine is provided by my ISP as part of the 'business' package). This fixes all sending mail problems. For extra fairy-dust, I added SPF records to my mail server IP. The BIG problem is Spam. Unless you pay for an intermediary spam filtering service, you will NEVER be on top of it. After self-hosting m…

> The BIG problem is Spam.

YMMV, but a combination of graylisting, RBL and "sender address valiation" tends to drop inbound spam rate to nearly zero.

Re: How to run your own mail server (2017)

#238

Post by jwr »

BenjiWiebe wrote: post #54
wpietri wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed! I've been running my own mail server for 20+ years, and I would not recommend that anybody do this on a lark. Deliverability to GMail is a huge problem for me and has been for years. I even asked friends at Google to find out what the story was. All I got back is that the mail group was so careful/paranoid it wouldn't talk to them either. I would long ago have switched over to a vendor, but I use qmail-style…

Funny. I'm somewhat new to the game but my email server has had very few problems delivering anywhere (hosting a small business' email, and personal email for the employees.) I've got spf, dkim, and dmarc. I use tls on everything. Got a static ip (linode) with rdns. I've never had a problem delivering to gmail. For a while i had problems delivering to Hotmail/outlook, but participating in some sort of junk mail repor…

I've been running my own E-mail servers for the last 20 years or so, and have not seen these delivery problems.

Re: How to run your own mail server (2017)

#239

Post by Angostura »

I suppose its worth mentioning that there are two kinds of mail server you can run.

I've often thought of running my own IMAP server (I like syncing, but I want to retain all my e-mails and not worry about quotas).

As for SMTP - I'm happy for my ISP to handle that.

Re: How to run your own mail server (2017)

#240

Post by theqult »

dpcan wrote: post #22

Then you realize the true pain of having a near-zero reputation when trying to email anything to people on Gmail, Yahoo, Live, etc, etc. Expect to go to spam even if you have DKIM, SPF, and no relaying. If anyone actually knows the secret to not having your own mail-server's mail go to spam on these bigger systems, please tell, I've Googled it for years with no success.

You have to configure a super complicated system of SEC-DNS and connect it to Postifix. Thanks to the Spaghetti Fly Monster, this guy made all of this automatically

https://mailinabox.email/

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