I do away with the middle ground. I rent email services from businesses that specialize in email hosting and I own domain name. No way I will have my email serviced by Google / MS / Apple and the likes.
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
#42As 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.
I think those numbers are too high. Even if not, companies like Airbus have that money and are using G-Suite. So Google has all corporate information (does the swamp redirect some of it to Boeing?).
Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#43Yeah 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…
I had a very similar experience. Is there any cheaper option than just using aws SES nowadays ? (for outbound only! don't understand why people would pay the same rate for inbound)
My concern is what happens when aws decides to massively increase rates...
Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#44I still run my own email system (postfix/dovecot for imap), mostly for one reason: the virtual username function of postfix:
I configured postfix with:
recipient_delimiter = .
I know that you can do the same thing with google addresses using + as a delimited, but the + sign is often not allowed in dumb email checks. Also spammers probably know about + and strip it automatically anyway...
Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#45I've been running my own email since i was 14 years old, back then it was hosted on my home ADSL connection. Now I'm on fiber and still running my own email setup, but the end is near..
For the reason not mentioned in the article, it's getting increasingly harder to actually get a public routable static IP address and also be allowed to either send traffic on port 25, or use the ISPs relay host to actually send the email.
Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#46The main problem I've run into while running my own email server is IP reputation issues. It is still an ongoing issue for me.
You can read my previous IP reputation issue in this comment [11].
You should make sure your server's IP address isn't blacklisted. If it is, you're going to have major delivery issues with some email server providers (ESP). Some blacklists you can check are listed here [0]-[3].
I think my main problem now is the UCE Protect [5] blacklist. I think some of the major ESPs use their harshest blacklist from UCE Protect, which is their Level 3 blacklist [6]. This blacklist will include your IP if your ISP meets a spam threshold for any of their other IP addresses. This makes running a mail server on cheap hosting providers like Digital Ocean or Linode very difficult.
My conclusion is I should switch to a more expensive ISP that isn't in danger of getting on the UCEPROTECTL3 list or find an email forwarding service for a next hop destination for outgoing mail.
You can read more about UCE Protect here [7]-[10].
[0]: mailtester: https://www.mail-tester.com/
[1]: mxtoolbox blacklists: https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx
[2]: proofpoint blacklist: https://ipcheck.proofpoint.com
[4]: outlook blacklist: https://sendersupport.olc.protection.outlook.com/snds/index....
[5]: UCEPROTECT: http://www.uceprotect.net/en/index.php
[6]: UCEPROTECTL3 blacklist: http://www.uceprotect.net/en/index.php?m=3&s=5
[7]: UCEPROTECT Blacklist Scam https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/2170592-uceprotect-bl...
[8]: UCEPROTECT: When RBLs Go Bad https://blog.sucuri.net/2021/02/uceprotect-when-rbls-go-bad....
[9]: ASK HN thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26064722
[10]: SQLite3 IP blacklisted: https://sqlite.org/forum/forumpost/bb61881d7a?hist
[11]: Previous IP reputation issue https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25437841
Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#47I think I am showing my age when I say, I remember when Linux by default came with sendmail enabled by default. You could use your Linux box to send e-mail anywhere without it getting caught up in spam filters. Fun times.
Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#48As 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.
It absolutely doesn't cost 20k EUR/yr in hardware to run a email server, but the time sink is ridiculous.
Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#49I still run my own email system (postfix/dovecot for imap), mostly for one reason: the virtual username function of postfix: I configured postfix with: recipient_delimiter = . which gives me unlimited dynamic virtual addresses (username. @mydomain), so I know where spam/leaks come from if I get unsolicited mail directed to `username. `, and it makes it trivial to block. I know that you can do the same thing with goog…
Gmail works with . as delimiter as well as +
Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#50I 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...
They are going to block standard authentication soon though, leaving only their 'modern' webbased authentication. So basically IMAP/POP as we (and our mail clients) know it will no longer work with O365.
They've already delayed it a few times but they keep pushing for this.