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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

#101

Post by jacquesm »

pjc50 wrote: post #93
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.

The citation you are looking for is my inbox. That's the spam that still makes it through and there is quite a bit of it, conversely some ham consistently gets misclassified as spam or just simply disappears entirely.

You are of course welcome to not believe me.

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

#102

Post by ajdude »

A couple years so I set up a mailinabox server on a vm for my personal email. Incredibly simple, $5/month and “just works”; I can even sync my contacts and calendar.

My only complaint was the graylisting but I quickly resolved that with a configuration file.

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

#103

Post by ssl232 »

0x0 wrote: post #91
ssl232 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Port 25 is only required if the destination doesn't support TLS, I think. I've not opened port 25 outgoing on my server and I've had zero issues delivering sent mail to other servers for maybe 5 years.

I think OP might have meant "receiving on port 25 is getting difficult" rather than sending. The spec requires servers to support unencrypted deliveries over port 25, even though almost all servers use TLS these days.

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

#105

Post by tudorw »

kro wrote: post #86
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,…

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 :)

same experience here, perfect score but no mail into Microsoft

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

#106

Post by leephillips »

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,…

Exactly. I’ve been running my own email server for over a decade not because I think I’m artisanal, but for practical reasons. But I don’t send out spam or “newletters”.

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

#107

Post by caymanjim »

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 hear this all the time, but I question how true it is. I've been running my own mail servers for decades, and I've never had any problems with sending or receiving mail. I suspect anyone who properly configures their server will be fine.

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

#109

Post by vbezhenar »

lnxg33k1 wrote: post #60

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…

Yeah, when everyone uses gmail, that's kind of pointless to run your own server, because Google will have most of your conversations either way.

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

#110

Post by Retric »

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…

Business use of email tends to look a lot like spam and people mark it as such. An appointment reminder or notification that something just shipped is generally fine. Send out mass notification of your holiday sales and that’s going into someone’s spam folder.
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