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Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one

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Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one

#21

Post by LeonM »

> (with DMARC signatures and other modern email practices)

DMARC does not provide signatures, DKIM does.

DMARC adds the DKIM 'alignment' requirement. Meaning that not just any DKIM signature will do, the public key (the DKIM DNS record) must be published under the administrative domain (the part after the '@' in the sender address).

DMARC also mandates SPF alignment (not that your should rely on SPF), meaning that the rfc5321.MailFrom and rfc5322.From address should be from the same administrative domain for the SPF to pass DMARC.

When either SPF or DKIM is aligned, you have a DMARC pass. Because SPF breaks with forwarding services, you shouldn't rely on it. DKIM + DMARC is the way to go.

Also funny that the author calls DMARC 'modern practice', since DMARC was introduced in March 2015, almost 7 years ago.

Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one

#23

Post by sascha_sl »

Also, a lot of software in the field has never made sense to me. I know what the parts do, but I couldn't tell you how to assemble it all. It all seems very old and seperate software more for historical reasons than anything else.

I ran mailinabox for a year or two, but eventually I just didn't want to maintain a piece of software I didn't understand where the documentation seemed actively hostile and presumptuous about me having read all the other parts. I'm sure the postfix docs make an okay reference, but understanding it as a whole, god no. I'd rather do Kubernetes from scratch.

Fastmail is just fine for me.

Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one

#24

Post by zyftay »

It is a wonderful world we live in. Everything from salary negotiations to love affairs is on someone else's servers, all in plaintext. Apart from email this also applies to Slack, which is a goldmine for keeping dossiers on developers.

This is one thing the authoritarians like Biden (Clipper Chip, Patriot Act) won't want to fix. There will be no law that companies with more than 100 employees must accept mail from individual servers (they would still have the correspondence anyway, but it would be a start). There will be no law that all mail must be encrypted.

Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one

#25

Post by sys_64738 »

rwmj wrote: post #10
nkrisc wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think you can stop it. I have to imagine that this woman doesn’t have an email address and just gives out what she thought was a fake one, since so many things require it. Otherwise, how could she not notice she never receives anything?

Someone signed up for an Amex card using my wife's gmail address. This was years ago, and she still gets the Amex emails regularly (like, between daily and weekly). It's incredible both that the Amex customer doesn't notice, and also that Amex has absolutely no method whatsoever for a non-customer to contact them and fix the problem.

Somebody signed up with PayPal using my gmail but I can’t reclaim it without providing sign up info. It works the reverse too.

Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one

#26

Post by jacquesm »

Except of course that it isn't an artisanal choice, a very practical one that is made increasingly impossible by the few very large email providers that are left. It should be as simple as hosting a web server.

Speaking of which, how long before it won't be possible to host your own web server?

On another note: the biggest source of spam is gmail itself, and guess what, that makes it to my inbox just fine, because what could possibly be wrong with someone using google as their source. Spam was annoying but it was never an actual problem. The consolidation of the internet into a handful of players is a problem.

Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one

#27

Post by jacquesm »

rmdes wrote: post #6

Someone should try "artisanal email server" using cloudron or yunohost ! the bigger problem is that "authoritative" email monopolies such as Gmail, 365 and the other big ones arbitrarily define and impose what is a legit email server or not and even with better score than gmail an "artisanal" email server can suffer from being classified into spam by the big tech players just because they can and will do anything to…

This is exactly it. Email is now just another way to squeeze companies and private individuals alike instead of a cheap, secure and free way to communicate. Peer-to-peer email was worth having, in spite of the downsides.

Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one

#28

Post by _abox »

Yeah I stopped running my own. I kept getting blocked by Microsoft in particular (mainly consumer recipients at live.com and outlook.com, strange enough not corporate O365 users!). I'm 100% sure I did not send any spam, the only emails going to those addresses were legit from a family member. DMARC and SPF were all set perfectly, relays blocked, I was not on any spamlist and I never have been either.

Literally every month I got blocked again because my server did not have enough reputation. Kept logging tickets to get it unblocked and then a month later it was back. One time I did manage to get a personal email back from a guy in India. Said that it was because my mailserver did not send enough legitimate mail for their algorithm to trust it.

So the lack of spam is not enough anymore to be blocked. You actually have to send a load of legit traffic to build up 'reputation'. Now just being a small time sender is a problem. This way the big players can just carve out a bigger market for themselves. They basically break the decentralised concept of email by doing this.

In the end I moved to O365, which felt bad because I didn't want to reward them for their behaviour. But we moved to it at work too and I wanted an instance with full admin rights to explore. My contract is up next year so I may change then if I can find a party that does it well and ideally cheaper.

Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one

#29

Post by zzless »

I would agree that setting up a robust personal email system is difficult and may be exceedingly so for an organization of any significant size but I am not sure I would attribute that to the quality of services from large providers. Our organization (a university) outsourced its email to MS (outlook) and it is simply awful. No IMAP or POP, no forwarding (this is of course the policy of the university, not MS' fault per se), important emails getting lost as 'spam' (including some once in a lifetime conference invitations) just because they came from the outside. The search is a complete nightmare. No way to send mass emails to one's class with, say individually generated temporary passwords, which I can easily do from my own server. The interface is clunky to say the least. In comparison, even Thunderbird shines (although why TB cannot implement its quick search function for years now is beyond me). So it is not the quality that the big providers supply. Security, maybe (even though they are a large target by default) but not convenience.

Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one

#30

Post by morsch »

LeonM wrote: post #21

> (with DMARC signatures and other modern email practices) DMARC does not provide signatures, DKIM does. DMARC adds the DKIM 'alignment' requirement. Meaning that not just any DKIM signature will do, the public key (the DKIM DNS record) must be published under the administrative domain (the part after the '@' in the sender address). DMARC also mandates SPF alignment (not that your should rely on SPF), meaning that th…

I suppose that's relatively recent for a technology that's 40 years old.
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