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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)

#261

Post by pgib »

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.

Not a perfect solution, but you _could_ relay through a provider like Sendgrid. For personal use, the cost would be very minimal if not free.

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

#262

Post by kazinator »

linsomniac wrote: post #259
kazinator wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have to do it for your personal mail compared to a few thousand users, the problems will obviously be fewer, because you don't send to as many different destinations as a crew of a few thousand users. > "Just do that for 300 years and your lawn will look like this." My point is that I've never had problems in that decade, not that it took a decade to fix. I think on two or three occasions, mail to a gmail user…

And my point, not to belabor it, is that reputation seems to be a pretty big deal these days, and your experience running a mail server with a decade of reputation may be different than the experience someone has setting up an e-mail server today. :-)

I do not have an e-mail server that has any reputation.

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

#263

Post by rhizome »

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.

>Do you know that your messages arrive in all cases?

"I have no trouble sending to anybody (that I've heard of from recipients" might not be as artfully written as I would like, but that's what that refers to.

Furthermore, blackholing emails like you suggest is generally rare. RFC 5321 (SMTP) states:

"[D]ropping mail without notification of the sender is permitted in practice. However, it is extremely dangerous and violates a long tradition and community expectations that mail is either delivered or returned. If silent message-dropping is misused, it could easily undermine confidence in the reliability of the Internet's mail systems. So silent dropping of messages should be considered only in those cases where there is very high confidence that the messages are seriously fraudulent or otherwise inappropriate."

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

#264

Post by rhizome »

jasode wrote: post #72
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…

>I've been running my own mail server for 20 years Yes, maybe rhizome is successfully running his own personal mail server but your anecdote isn't really relevant. We can't learn from your example because the hidden rules of reputation & spam may not affect you but will affect others. For example, a commenter (lucb1e) argued[0][1] that I was exaggerating the difficulties of reliably sending email but a year later in…

I'm at least an instance of one that demonstrates that it's possible. The person you link to sounds misconfigured to some degree, but in the main two things they don't mention are whether they are using static IPs (as I am), or if they tried emailing postmaster@ to try and smooth out their difficulties. There is still a collegial network of people who run this stuff all over the world, and I'm certainly not the only person running a closet mailserver.

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

#265

Post by wpietri »

jimmaswell wrote: post #258
wpietri wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sort of snotty reply is one of the reasons I discourage people from using HN. I chose it 20+ years ago because that's what qmail supported, back when subaddresing was a new idea. Over the ensuing years, most people ended up converging on + as the more common option, but that's only convention, not a standard. And what standard exists wasn't written until 2008: https://tools.https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5233iet…

If you took that as snotty then that's on you. Maybe people who can't take every simple question not being a delicately delivered paragraph full of qualifiers should be discouraged from using HN, yeah.

Yes, please continue to blame readers for your words landing badly. That will surely work out well for you.

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

#266

Post by linsomniac »

kazinator wrote: post #262
linsomniac wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And my point, not to belabor it, is that reputation seems to be a pretty big deal these days, and your experience running a mail server with a decade of reputation may be different than the experience someone has setting up an e-mail server today. :-)

I do not have an e-mail server that has any reputation.

If you run a mail server for a decade, as I believe you said you have, then you've gotten a reputation. This site lists some places you can check the reputation: https://sendgrid.com/blog/5-ways-check-sending-reputation/

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

#267

Post by benbristow »

gumby wrote: post #8
benbristow wrote: post #3

Alternatively pay for a GSuite account for like £3 a month (Or Office 365) and all of this is handled for you with superior spam filtering, search, webmail, no manual administration and no issues with email delivery due to other filters thinking your server is a bit dodgy. It's too much effort to run your own email server well.

Some of us don't use google. Plus you have to use a web browser. I use a variety of clients as Dovecot is standards-compliant unlike gmail. Also I run things over my mail database as I have direct access to it. I'm sure there are some people for whom google is an acceptable option. But it isn't for everyone.

Life must be hard to not use Google. Too many good services.

Search, Mail, Photos, Translate, YouTube, Maps, Drive, Calendar, Docs, News etc. etc.

What do you replace them with? In experience Google is usually the best or not far from the best.

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

#268

Post by gumby »

benbristow wrote: post #267
gumby wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of us don't use google. Plus you have to use a web browser. I use a variety of clients as Dovecot is standards-compliant unlike gmail. Also I run things over my mail database as I have direct access to it. I'm sure there are some people for whom google is an acceptable option. But it isn't for everyone.

Life must be hard to not use Google. Too many good services. Search, Mail, Photos, Translate, YouTube, Maps, Drive, Calendar, Docs, News etc. etc. What do you replace them with? In experience Google is usually the best or not far from the best.

It’s not hard at all, and in fact is Typically easier. Google has degraded search to the point where it rarely gives me a useful result; instead the primary results are ads and “boxes”, so switching to ddg was a pleasure. tools like mail and photo aren’t as fast or convenient as local apps; with local data I can switch from app to app. Yes Apple Maps isn’t as good as google maps, but in some ways is better. I watch the odd YouTube video in private mode but if I watch three videos a month it’s a lot so if it went away I doubt I’d notice. and docs...blech, where to start. I still get new documents from companies I left long ago. The editing tools are primitive.

I know people talk about Apple having a “walled garden” but really for me it’s google that has one, now with a shitty web based interface.

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

#269

Post by megous »

magashna wrote: post #82
megous wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really is not. At most it can be tedious, because it has large surface area of protocols and formats. Most of them other than SMTP and message format are optional. Minimal mail system involves just postfix with config in a bunch of files, delivering mail to a folder on the server, and pretty much everything on top, like SPF,DKIM,DMARC,... is optional. You can ssh to your server from anywhere and run mutt there, or…

Confirming your emails are getting through to providers like gmail is the hard part

It's not the hard part, it's simply impossible to ensure from your side. You can have everytrhing righy, and they'll still block you based on IP address.

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

#270

Post by fpierfed »

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.

I am writing this with sadness and frustration in my heart.

The only issue I have found seriously limiting my ability to use my own self hosted email server is the deliberate decision of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft to make it hard for me to do so.

Their decision is essentially un-appealable. I still get hotmail complaints about spam being sent from an IP I do not own anymore. For the life of me I could not find a way to solve this. Yes I did remove that address from their “responsible domain owner nonsense thingy” to no avail.

Often times I would send an email to a domain owned by one of the big three and that email would just disappear. No bounce back at all. The recipient would not even see it in their spam folder.

They tell you to implement various technical solution line DMARC and DKIM but in the end what really matters is the arbitrary and capricious decision of these three companies against which there is no recourse.

I agree that hosting your own email server is important but this is a battle that I gave up fighting.

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