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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

#71

Post by ssl232 »

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…

How often do you need to send on port 25? In my experience also running my own mail server, never. Receive from servers that don't support encryption yes, but never send. I always send using TLS and since maybe 5 years I've not had an issue with a receiving server not supporting it.

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

#72

Post by southerntofu »

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…

There's a few ways to approach this question. One is to mention community networks (DIY ISPs) which will ensure you always have a public IP without filtering. Some even provide VPN access so that you can use your filtered internet to acquire a publicly-routable IP. This is a common pattern in the ffdn.org federation of non-profit ISPs.

Another one is to mention hosting coops (libreho.st/chatons.org) and how they could be employed in limited-network situations. On the web, we have SNI/eSNI-aware proxying which enables multiple servers to share a single IP without revealing their private keys to the reverse proxy. I don't know of an equivalent in the email world (because it's assumed there is only one MX with a canonical domain/DKIM per IP), but i'm all ears if you have suggestions!

Of course, we could mention onionMX and other key-routing systems (CJDNS..) but the problem is you need it to be supported on the other side as well, which is highly unlikely.

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

#73

Post by southerntofu »

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.

This defeats the entire point of selfhosting whether it's for security concerns or autonomy. The ecological impact of VPS hosting every single service you need is also not negligible: datacenters require huge amounts of resources and infrastructure which a simple second-hand machine at home doesn't.

(also worth mentioning: email protocols were explicitly conceived so that uptime is not a worry)

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

#74

Post by tdrdt »

jacquesm wrote: post #26

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 wh…

"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."

I don't get this one. How do large email providers make it difficult to host your own email?

I host my own email. It was a pain to setup so I try not to touch it since it is running fine. Setting up email on your own server is just complicated unless you install server management software. I am not sure big email providers are to blame for this.

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

#75

Post by ssl232 »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #34
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 serv…

Agree regarding learning the magic words. There''s probably no substitute to just diving in and setting up a server with a domain you can afford to get blacklisted for a few weeks while you make mistakes. But once you know the magic words, Dovecot's documentation is actually fairly decent these days: https://doc.dovecot.org/.

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

#76

Post by roywashere »

hannob wrote: post #70
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,…

Indeed, after setting up dmarc and such delivery is no longer really an issue. I guess around 10 years ago, that was different!

But what is a problem is providing a good enough web interface, search, and so on.

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

#77

Post by habibur »

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…

Same goes for me. Running postfix server on DO box for a decade. Hotmail is the most troublesome.

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

#78

Post by southerntofu »

bijant wrote: post #52
mcbits wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 the…

Yeah SMTP relaying is quite common. The problem is due to email architecture, to my knowledge, that same relay is going to be able to read your incoming emails because remote servers will block emails from user@endserver.org sent from relay.net unless endserver.org has MX entries pointing to relay.net.

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

#79

Post by ssl232 »

_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 may just have been unlucky with your IP block having spammers. How were you hosting it - own ISP or another provider?

I have not had deliverability issues for years with my Kimsufi (OVH France) server. While I am confident my server is well configured using best practices, I suspect some of it is also just luck not to be in the same IP block as a spammer.

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

#80

Post by southerntofu »

_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'm sorry this happened to you, but it's a shame. You end up giving money to your perpetrators and leaving the rest of us in the same situation you were in previously.

Maybe a hosting coop could be an option? Large enough for reputation but ethical enough to still federate with smaller hosts?

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