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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

#61

Post by GekkePrutser »

throw0101a wrote: post #8
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?

> Otherwise, how could she not notice she never receives anything? She may be getting it at f.lastname@gmail.com. I signed up for Gmail the first or second day it came out with first.last@gmail.com, but hardly ever log(ged) in over the years. A little while ago I did go into it and noticed getting a bunch of message to firstlast@gmail.com. Now Gmail allows for 'customized' addresses in that you can drop a period anyw…

Yeah that dot thing is weird with gmail. Could very well be the reason. Good luck reaching a human to fix it though!

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

#64

Post by davidhyde »

_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…

I tried office 365 for email this year but couldn’t get the marketing emails from Microsoft under control. No matter how much time I spent trawling through the settings menus. Almost every email I got was about some security update or promotion from some ms product I did not use and had no intention of using. And I was paying for O365 too!

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

#65

Post by GekkePrutser »

flyinghamster wrote: post #39
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…

Even a service as big as Microsoft's has pretty bad spamfiltering though. It's slightly better than an untuned SpamAssassin config but it's really not a lot better.

A lot of legit emails end up in my spam box.

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

#66

Post by phh »

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…

Some ISPs provide VPNs on their AS at cheapish price. For instant milkywan in France provide one with public constant IPv4 for 5€/month in France. It obviously make the whole setup much more complicated, because it leads to a kinda multi-homing setup, but I think it's still reasonable.

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

#67

Post by MaKey »

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 +

I believe you can insert dots as you wish but not use it like the plus sign. So abc@gmail.com is the same as a.b.c@gmail.com but abc.new@gmail.com is another account than abc@gmail.com.

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

#68

Post by matt123456789 »

FpUser wrote: post #41

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.

Who do you use? After seeing all the horror stories posted on HN, I have been worried about getting banned from $MegaCorp randomly and would like to minimize the blast radius if that were to happen.

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

#69

Post by dorfsmay »

pacija wrote: post #35

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.

This is not true. Regardless of how secure and properly setup your server is:

Outlook blocks anybody that does not send enough mail, even if you've never sent any spam and are on a clean block. They're happy to let their users to send you spam, but ironically they still block you when you you try to report it to abuse. The good thing is they block you, so the email bounced and you know it wasn't delivered.

Gmail classify messages to a user who has never communicated with you before as spam. This is silent, so you never really know if an email to a Gmail box has been filtered out as spam or not. Their abuse inbox accepts messages but I'm not sure they do anything with it.

Basically, email has been hijacked by two companies.

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

#70

Post by hannob »

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…

I'm running an email server and I can tell you that this is by and large not the case.

If you put some decent effort into making sure that you don't send spam, try to monitor if anyone thinks you send spam and react when someone complains that you send spam (and stop it), it works.

In my experience people telling these stories often do send spam, but they don't believe they do. ("It's not spam, it's a Newsletter. No, it has no unsubscribe link. These are people that agreed to be put on the newsletter by clicking on some ToS they never read, and they can unsubscribe by some arcane mechanism that we will make as complicated as we can. But we're definitely not spammers.")

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