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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

#81

Post by elondaits »

southerntofu wrote: post #73
moltar wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Datacenters use energy and computer resources more efficiently than a machine at home, unless the machine at home is already running some other tasks that you can't move to the datacenter. A computer that's 99% idle is wasting most of the energy it consumes.

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

#82

Post by jacquesm »

tdrdt wrote: post #74
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…

> How do large email providers make it difficult to host your own email?

By randomly marking your email as spam without any recourse. This may be because they blacklist your provider en bloc, your IP address or some subnet, because they feel like it, it's Tuesday or because their spam filters suck.

But it happens and it happens often enough that running a business in that way will cost you money, sometimes lots of it.

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

#83

Post by tdrdt »

I run my own email. But I think it is a software problem.

It would be nice of you could just install an email program that will set all the right settings for you. DNS, database, roles and rights, certificates, firewall and so on.

There is server management software that can do this but then you have the same problem: it is just complicated for most people.

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

#84

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

I've run mail servers.

These days, it's probably easier than it was, back then (about twenty years ago).

It was a nightmare. I didn't do it for a living, so I was consumed by the task. It screwed up my other work, something fierce.

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

#85

Post by kiklion »

_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…

> This way the big players can just carve out a bigger market for themselves.

Or it’s because there is a near infinite number of domains so it’s relatively simple for spammers to avoid bad rep blocks by grabbing new domains and starting fresh.

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

#86

Post by kro »

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,…

To most, including Gmail, it's actually no problem with DMARC in my experience too.

However, one of my servers IPs is on a Microsoft blacklist since many years now. It sends <10 messages / day. I've tried every unlist form I could find, even called MS but it does not get taken of that list and they "won't disclose why". I'm routing SMTP to MS via another relay now :)

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

#87

Post by 2Gkashmiri »

i kinda have to disagree. i decided to take the plunge and i used a cheap racknerd vps and used Mailinabox. 5 minutes setup and occasional updates.

i got set as spam by google for the first few months but nothing since then. sure, one day i managed to spam like 200 emails in quick succession and that put me into spam but a quick "please select as unspam" solved it. i've been running this for like a year and it has been a good experience. i recommend people try this out, it doesn't cost a tonne

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

#88

Post by Kwpolska »

tdrdt wrote: post #74
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…

The problem with e-mail, and with other forms of communication, is that two parties (or their service providers) need to co-operate. You can run your own e-mail server just fine, but Google, Microsoft and friends might consider you to be a spammer or silently block your e-mail just because.

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

#89

Post by pmlnr »

tdrdt wrote: post #83

I run my own email. But I think it is a software problem. It would be nice of you could just install an email program that will set all the right settings for you. DNS, database, roles and rights, certificates, firewall and so on. There is server management software that can do this but then you have the same problem: it is just complicated for most people.

There is such thing: https://maddy.email/

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

#90

Post by chrisweekly »

Fastmail is, IME, an excellent email service provider. No, it's not really "running your own", but it's exactly what most people who want to avoid gmail are looking for, re: deliverability, featureset, privacy, UX, etc. Highest recommendation, from an unaffiliated happy customer.
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