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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

#91

Post by 0x0 »

ssl232 wrote: post #71
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.

If you want to deliver email to other domains then you need to connect to port 25 on the destination domain MX server. As far as I know, best practice for the other ports (465, 587) is to require authentication and to reject anonymous submissions.

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

#92

Post by baobabKoodaa »

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,…

> If you put some decent effort [...] it works

Well, I put in more than some decent effort, and I didn't get it "to work". I detailed my efforts here:

https://www.attejuvonen.fi/dont-send-email-from-your-own-ser...

Please stop spreading falsehoods. If you were able to somehow get your own email server to deliver email to Gmail and Outlook, great, good for you - but stop pretending that anybody can do it.

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

#93

Post by pjc50 »

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…

> biggest source of spam is gmail itself

[citation needed]; is this actually going out from gmail or does it just use gmail return addresses?

I too used to run my own email from about 2000-2010, but the maintenance overhead is quite stressful especially because it always happens for critical times or critical emails.

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

#94

Post by jacquesm »

ToddWBurgess wrote: post #47

I 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.

Personally, I'd prefer to have to deal with the spam than to have to deal with the duopoly in email that we have today.

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

#95

Post by southerntofu »

elondaits wrote: post #81
southerntofu wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Datacenters use energy and computer resources more efficiently

That is both true and misleading. Once the datacenter and all surrounding infrastructure (optic fibers, fuel pit, dedicated electricity lines, cooling equipment) and all server/networking hardware has been built, then you start having a better efficiency. If the whole cycle is taken into account, there's no way VPS can be as "green" as selfhosting.

A computer will usually take more energy to build than it will consume over its entire lifetime, so repurposing an existing machine is a good way to go (if you consider minerals-related pollution, even more so).

Also, when you're in a datacenter, servers will be changed every few years. For something as simple/lightweight as email, a 20y old computer will do just fine. A datacenter will renew its entire hardware a few times in that timeframe.

> A computer that's 99% idle is wasting most of the energy it consumes

That is true whether it's in a datacenter or at home. But of course you can share/mutualize resources with other people in order to mitigate this.

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

#96

Post by gbuk2013 »

dorfsmay wrote: post #59
gbuk2013 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Their email referenced AS3150 ... Here is what the (clearly frustrated) RamNode support person had to say last time I enquired:

  AS3150 is NTT, a large backbone provider: https://bgp.he.net  /AS3150
  RamNode runs AS3842 and AS198203. We have contacted them before - they don't know why nor care why their system is raising issue with AS3150 in regard to emails from our network.       
  But this issue isn't exclusive to our network either, and no other major email provider blocks emails like this.
I have no reason not to believe him. :)

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

#97

Post by jacquesm »

rwmj wrote: post #7
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.

It never stopped. What is however more annoying are all the "marketing messages" from all the companies you ever bought a single thing from in your life. It's incredible how often some companies spam you with this (often more than once a day). Really not sure what they are trying to achieve, but for me it's the resolution never to buy anything from them again as I filter their whole domain permanently.

Those I usually forward to their legal department with a little extra bit that says that I have stopped doing business with them on account of their UCE.

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

#98

Post by jacquesm »

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #92
hannob wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> If you put some decent effort [...] it works Well, I put in more than some decent effort, and I didn't get it "to work". I detailed my efforts here: https://www.attejuvonen.fi/dont-send-email-from-your-own-ser... Please stop spreading falsehoods. If you were able to somehow get your own email server to deliver email to Gmail and Outlook, great, good for you - but stop pretending that anybody can do it.

And even if you did get it to work there is absolutely no guarantee that they won't block you tomorrow morning for no reason at all.

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

#99

Post by [deleted] »

jacquesm wrote: post #82
tdrdt wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

[deleted]

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

#100

Post by vbezhenar »

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…

If you're running your own server, you can just setup catch-all account and use something like $(printf %s news.ycombinator.com | sha256sum | head -c 12)@mymail.com for further privacy.
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