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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

#51

Post by foxfluff »

lixtra wrote: post #20

> … general security will not be as good as they have. > Entirely "on premise" email is now an inferior thing for almost everyone. I disagree on this one. Placing your email with a big player means that by definition, they have access to your mailbox (with sensitive stuff hopefully encrypted). To allow that you have to trust the big player and the countries where they reside. They can drop you any time for political…

They may also kick you out any time for arbitrary reasons.

"Your account has been suspended for suspicious activity."

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

#52

Post by bijant »

mcbits wrote: post #38
_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...

In theory it would be simple to provide a "cloudworkers cooperative" kind of service that just bundles the outbound mail so that traffic is sufficiently large to be whitelisted by the big providers. The two biggest problems are A. Scaling up sufficiently without attracting Spammers. Because even a single Spammer can ruin your reputation forever. So ideally you'd have a tight knit group of friends or similar. Even then you could hardly assure than no one ever gets hacked. B. Edge Cases. Even if your US or West European Traffic is sufficient to be whitelisted by all major Providers, how do you ensure that the occasional Email to a customer of an Indonesian ISP does not get blocked by their provider...

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

#53

Post by adtac »

blop wrote: post #44

I 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…

You don't need to run your own email server for this. I do this with a catch-all in Fastmail for $50/year or something. I'm pretty sure Gmail and most others can do this too.

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

#54

Post by blop »

desas wrote: post #49
blop wrote: post #44

I 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 +

with gmail you can do:

    foo+anything  => redirected to foo
    foo.something => redirected to foosomething (so . is not the same as +)
The + isn't always accepted in dumb email checks though, and spammers know about it...

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

#55

Post by moltar »

dusted wrote: post #45

I'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 e…

Can you host it on vultr? Just $2.50/mo for half a gig of RAM instance.

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

#56

Post by southerntofu »

blop wrote: post #44

I 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…

Love that, too! I've always been amazed that spammers aren't able (to my knowledge) to defeat such a simple scheme by removing the . or + in the local part.

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

#57

Post by efficax »

necovek wrote: post #3

I've got a personal email server and an old gmail address from gmail-beta days. I've never used gmail itself (that model doesn't fit my mind), but O do use that Google account for some minor stuff. Unfortunazely, I've repeatedly gotten email targetted at someone else having same first name initial and same last name on gmail (address is in the form of FLastname@gmail.com). I've usually been able to get through to tho…

I also get an endless amount of email for a few different people with the same name as me at my Gmail from 2005. I used to try to deal with it but now it's just amusing, especially the photos, family chain emails etc. My name alike is Canadian so it's a little glimpse across the border

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

#58

Post by adtac »

moltar wrote: post #55
dusted wrote: post #45

I'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 e…

Can you host it on vultr? Just $2.50/mo for half a gig of RAM instance.

I don't think you get a static IPv4 address with that instance.

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

#59

Post by dorfsmay »

gbuk2013 wrote: post #19
jacob019 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do too, gmail is not a problem at all, but I have had the same static IP on AWS for about a decade, reverse DNS is mandatory for deliverability. My problem with Gmail is it is difficult to filter SPAM coming from their servers. My biggest problem with mail delivery is sending mail to Microsoft properties. I've had to resort to sending those messages via SES. Open source webmail solutions suck, so now I'm paying fas…

Also run my one server for years without too much trouble. Hotmail is the one giving me the most hassle - for some reason they periodically block my IP address for apparently belonging to an ASN they block … except it belongs to an entirely different ASN. My provider (RamNode) say they’ve been trying to get someone there for years to fix their system but didn’t help, so I just fill in their unblock form now and again…

If you have any neighbourgh on your block that has sent spam, then the entire IP block gets a bad reputation. I moved away from OVH because of this. I no longer get the issue )on Vultr) but still get 100% blocked by outlook.com and blocked by Gmail if I'm the one initiating the conversation (I can mail people once they've emailed me at least once)

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

#60

Post by lnxg33k1 »

As a person running his own email system, I think it's taking more efforts from people to convince everyone to don't run their email systems than managing it effectively, and I don't have any bouncing even towards gmail et similia. As a company the only concern for me is not managing an email, is more to give third party private for profit companies access to all my communications (even if I guess sending it to other unaware people using gmail / 365 has the same effect), but for me it's crazy that the world has accepted that
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