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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

#31

Post by switch007 »

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…

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

Oh come on, in terms of protocols, that's modern.

Your other points have merit but that's just a pointless dig at the author.

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

#32

Post by superluserdo »

I run my own personal SMTP and IMAP server and haven't found it too hard to maintain after the initial setup phase. The main problem I had with getting emails accepted was my lack of reverse DNS PTR records on my domain. If you're unable to fix that (eg, you're not using a commericial internet connection that allows this) the solution is just to use another SMTP relay service. Some, like SMTP2go, are free if you're only sending a personal-use number of emails a day/month. That way you're still in charge of everything except the relaying of outgoing mail, which is easy enough to swap out.

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

#33

Post by jodrellblank »

zzless wrote: post #29

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…

> "simply awful. No IMAP or POP"

Microsoft seem to disagree with you there: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/pop-imap-and-smtp...

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

#34

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

sascha_sl wrote: post #23

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 ab…

Postfix and Dovecot are classic magic word projects - completely useless unless you can work out the magic words, and then they work fine.

The docs for magic word projects never to seem to prioritise essentials. So [obscure feature someone last used in 1984] gets equal billing with [essential fundamentals] and you have no idea which is which because - you haven't understood the docs yet.

I'm still running my own servers. I sorted out the spam issues, and they're basically zero maintenance now. But it certainly took a while, and a fair amount of copying other people's ideas of what a config file should look like, with plenty of trial and error.

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

#35

Post by pacija »

As usual, it is a financial one.

Do you have ~30,000 EUR / year for skilled admin? Plus ~20,000 EUR / year for hardware and other running costs? If you do, you can have your emails safely and reliably exchanged from your basement. If you don't, you can rent whatever on the 'net that suits your budget.

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

#36

Post by realityking »

jodrellblank wrote: post #33
zzless wrote: post #29

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…

> " simply awful. No IMAP or POP " Microsoft seem to disagree with you there: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/pop-imap-and-smtp...

I suspect OP’s organization disabled it. Not really Microsoft’s fault but that how a lot of Enterprise products get a bad name - user hostile configuration.

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

#37

Post by zzless »

jodrellblank wrote: post #33
zzless wrote: post #29

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…

> " simply awful. No IMAP or POP " Microsoft seem to disagree with you there: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/pop-imap-and-smtp...

As I mention in my post, this is the setting our admins chose so I do not blame MS for this (they support both, I know). Another setting they chose is to delete emails over six months of age and there is nothing I can do about it either.

The search and the interface are entirely the fault of MS as are the lack of more subtle features such as mass emails (which I have to use often while teaching online).

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

#38

Post by mcbits »

_abox wrote: post #28

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…

> Said that it was because my mailserver did not send enough legitimate mail for their algorithm to trust it.

In other words, a small self-hosted email server will be considered a spammer until it starts sending out large amounts of email? Maybe that can be automated...

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

#39

Post by flyinghamster »

upofadown wrote: post #4

Wait, is email spam still a thing? I only get a few spam a day and Spamassassin easily identifies them. I had assumed that the spammers had moved off to other mediums. Either that or they are specifically targeting big servers like Gmail and are leaving the smaller servers, with their varied (artisanal) anti-spam approaches alone.

If anything, it's worse than ever. The favored technique these days is "snowshoe" spamming, where $SPAMMER sends a trickle of spam from a large number of IP addresses. About the only way to stop it is to block the /24, and then they just move on to the next block of IPs they want to ruin. RBLs like Spamhaus are helpful, but there will always be a few spammer IPs that haven't yet been listed. SpamAssassin can be handy, but it's a pain and there's a lot of rope you can hang yourself with. Blocking certain TLDs outright (.cam is a good candidate not just because of this, but also the phishing potential) can be an option.

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

#40

Post by jacob019 »

_abox wrote: post #28

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…

You can configure postfix to relay emails to certain domains through a 3rd party SMTP service like SES. The MS domains give all of us the same problems, there is no other solution.
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